Forecasting Outages to Cut Restoration Time and Customer Losses

Introduction

Storms, extreme heat, and aging infrastructure are pushing grids harder every year. When equipment fails, the result is familiar. Neighborhoods go dark, traffic signals blink out, and critical facilities scramble for backup power.

For utilities and cities, each major outage is more than an inconvenience. It drives high operations and maintenance costs, strains line crews, floods call centers, and invites scrutiny from regulators and elected officials. Customers judge performance on how well you prepare, how fast you restore power, and how clearly you communicate.

Utilyze is an outage mapping and storm analytics platform built to support that work. It helps utilities and cities see where risk is building, where assets are failing, and where to send crews first, all on a single map-based view.

Feature Functionality

Weather and Outage Overlays

Utilyze brings live and forecast weather together with outage data on one screen. Operators can see lightning clusters forming in areas where outages are growing, watch temperature patterns that drive peak demand, and track precipitation that signals higher treefall and flood risk.

Instead of clicking between systems, control rooms get a clear picture of where conditions are most likely to trigger new failures or slow restoration. That makes it easier to prioritize which circuits and neighborhoods need attention first.

Infrastructure and Critical Facilities Layers

Not every outage is equal. Utilyze lets users filter maps by key infrastructure categories so they can see, at a glance, which customers are most sensitive.

Operators can view hospitals, fire stations, police facilities, and other critical sites in relation to current and forecasted outages. They can also see fleet locations such as school bus yards or delivery depots to plan EV charging, staging areas, and backup power needs.

For regions like ERCOT, Utilyze can show weather zones, load zones, substations, and feeders at a high level. The result is a shared picture that helps control rooms, public works, and emergency managers coordinate decisions.

Asset Monitoring and Vegetation Risk

Utilyze helps monitor transmission lines, distribution lines, and gas pipelines before, during, and after storms. By linking asset locations with weather and land use context, it becomes easier to understand which lines are exposed to wind, trees, or flood-prone areas.

Vegetation indicators and proximity to known risk zones can be used to rank assets by likely storm impact. Large scale gas leaks along pipelines can be flagged using remote imagery, so operators can focus field investigations where the risk appears highest without reviewing every mile of line.

Storm Management Workflows

Storm management does not start when the first call comes in. Utilyze supports work across three phases.

Before the storm, utilities can combine forecast data with historical outage clusters to stage crews, trucks, and materials where they will matter most. During the storm, control rooms and field supervisors can see which circuits and neighborhoods are at rising risk and reroute crews as conditions shift. After the storm passes, teams can target outage clusters, refine estimated times of restoration, and coordinate public communications from a shared source of truth.

The goal is simple. Give everyone the same situational picture so restoration can move faster and with fewer surprises.

Return On Investment

Major outages are expensive for utilities and their customers. Each event brings overtime, contractor bills, truck rolls, and materials, along with lost business, spoiled food, and community frustration.

Faster Restoration, Lower O&M

Across the country, large outages that affect tens of thousands of customers happen many times each year. Storm cost filings show that major events can cost utilities on the order of a few hundred dollars per affected customer in operations and maintenance alone.

If a 10,000 customer outage can be restored even 10 percent faster by using better maps and smarter crew prioritization, the avoided expense for that single event can reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over a full storm season, those savings compound.

Fewer Truck Rolls and Overtime Hours

Long restoration times mean more patrols, more truck rolls, and more overtime. When crews must drive circuit by circuit looking for the cause of an outage, costs rise quickly.

By pinpointing likely causes and high risk assets sooner, Utilyze helps reduce the number of blind patrols and unnecessary dispatches. Field supervisors can send the right crew to the right place on the first trip more often. Trim enough wasted drive time, repeat visits, and emergency contractor hours, and many utilities find they effectively break even at a modest per customer or per meter software fee.

Reduced Customer and Community Losses

Extended outages are costly for customers and communities. Lost productivity, closed businesses, and spoiled food add up. Studies estimate that economic losses for customers during large multi hour events can reach hundreds of dollars per customer.

If analytics can shave even a small percentage off outage duration, the avoided customer losses per event are significant. Faster and more predictable restoration also supports higher satisfaction scores, better regulatory relationships, and stronger trust with city leaders.

Call To Action

This overview only scratches the surface of what Utilyze can do for storm preparation, outage mapping, and restoration analytics. To see how these maps and workflows could fit into your control room or emergency operations center, request a short demo or discovery call. Together, we can explore how better visibility can help your teams restore power faster, control costs, and protect the communities you serve.

Download our Outage Maps Brochure for more information!