Collection, access and use of customer level interruption event data at PacifiCorp

As automated outage management systems (OMS) have become more widely adopted and entrenched within the electric utility business, they have concurrently become even more valuable in the post-interruption activities that ensue. As such, they are gold mines for analyzing root causes of interruptions, discussing reliability with customers and stakeholders, evaluating pockets where performance may be challenging and developing data-centric improved outage response processes. At PacifiCorp, tools and processes have continued to be more strategically targeted, and generally have migrated from system level performance views to circuit, then segment and now customer specific representations of outages. This paper will evaluate the way in which the interruption data is developed (notably in lockstep with the outage management process), how it is stored and used to support reliability analysis, what role it plays in evaluating customer-level performance and how this transition to more granular data has led to richer one-on-one dialogue with customers, supporting bridging the gap between customer expectations and system performance after interruptions have occurred.