Prior to the digitalisation of low voltage (LV) networks, power outages at the LV level could only be detected through phone calls received by customer service. This resulted in delayed incident resolution, user dissatisfaction and unnecessary interventions by technicians in case of misidentified failures. In response to this, since 2021, i-DE has implemented an automated routine to detect and verify power outages in LV and MV networks, leveraging data from three-phase smart meters.
Up to date, this system has allowed the detection and resolution of over 4000 outages before the reception of customer complaints and reduced the number of unnecessary technician interventions in the field to zero. A future upgrade of the system will further allow the identification of the exact phases affected by power loss thanks to the measurements recorded by installed single-phase smart meters.
