The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Eversource upgrades outage map
Eversource Energy has completed the second phase of a multiyear upgrade of the system it uses to communicate with customers about power outages.
The Hartford-based utility has rolled out a new, state-of-the-art outage map that provides more detailed information regarding customer outages. The new outage map allows customers to find out the time and cause of an outage, as well as the location of the problem and an estimated time of restoration.
Eversource’s previous outage map used color coding to show a range of outage levels. To find out how many customers had lost power within a given community, users had to go to an accompanying table.
Penni Conner, senior vice president and chief customer officer at Eversource, said the upgrades came out of customer engagement efforts by the company.
“The enhancements to our outage map are in direct response to requests for more detailed information during a power outage,” Conner said in a statement. “These upgrades highlight the many ways we are always working to serve our customers better.”
Mitch Gross, an Eversource spokesman, said company officials aren’t saying how much the utility spent on the upgrades.
Eversource launched the first phase of the outage communication system upgrade in December 2016, with the enhanced customer notification system. The upgrades added in that phase allowed customers to get outage information and updates via a method of their choosing: text message, email or phone.
“It’s a lot of work to roll these improvements out, so we determined it made sense to introduce them in phases,” Gross said. The improvement to the outage communication system are across Eversource’s entire service territory, which includes western and Massachusetts as well as New Hampshire.
Eversource delivers electricity to 1.2 million customers in 149 cities and towns in Connecticut. The company also provides natural gas to 232,000 customers in 73 Connecticut communities and supplies water to approximately 197,000 customers in 51 communities.
Connecticut’s other large electric utility, The United Illuminating Co., introduced an upgraded outage map in 2012.
Ed Crowder, a UI spokesman, said the upgraded version lets customers zoom in, with individual outage events represented by pins a user can click to show the affected area, estimated restoration time, status and other information. It replaced a static map that simply showed the number of outages per town, he said.