REDWOOD CITY, CA — (Marketwired) — 06/10/13 — C3 Energy today announced the availability of three new smart grid analytics applications for utilities — , and . These analytics applications help utilities continuously identify grid assets at risk of failure and direct capital investments to the grid assets with the potential for the most significant customer safety and reliability impact.
C3 Energy also announced enabling utilities to track the deployment status and operation of AMI meters. C3 AMI Operations helps ensure timely and accurate meter data to support customer billing and effective utility decision making.
The new C3 Energy smart grid applications deliver a broad range of benefits, including:
Up to $50/meter per year in value to utility operators and their customers;
Improved AMI deployment effectiveness;
Identification of grid assets at risk of failure;
Capital investment optimization;
Improved SAIDI, SAIFI, and CEMI reliability scores;
Improved customer satisfaction; and
Improved power reliability and safety.
“C3 Energy-s new grid analytics solutions deliver a unified view of meter deployments, system risks, and customer impacts,” said Ed Abbo, President and Chief Technical Officer, C3 Energy. “Customer-level reliability data and asset risk scoring enable utility operators to understand the impacts of specific investments on reliability and customer satisfaction and plan their investments to optimize performance.”
By aggregating data from all relevant customer and grid operational systems, as well as external data sources, and subjecting this data to extensive real-time analytics, C3 Energy-s Grid Analytics solutions provide real-time, actionable insights for utility grid operators.
C3 Energy-s unified product architecture enables the real-time assessment of the health of the power delivery system. Utility operators can identify assets at risk for failure — e.g. substations, pole-top transformers, or power lines — and repair or replace them preemptively. The ability to track and monitor asset health in real-time lowers operating costs, helps prevent outages, and minimizes unexpected capital investments.
C3 Asset & System Risk computes an Asset Risk Score — a function that takes account of both the probability of failure and the criticality of particular assets — for all network assets, from the substation to the distribution feeder to the customer meter. The Asset Risk Score helps utility operators identify distribution network components at high risk of failure and with a large impact on customers.
C3 Asset & System Risk also creates workforce management orders to optimize inspection and maintenance schedules for at-risk assets, and enables a quantitative, enterprise-wide approach to assessing system risk and managing service reliability.
C3 Customer Reliability & Safety leverages the data integrated by the platform — including asset risk — to assess reliability and service impacts at a customer or meter level. The analytics and business intelligence from C3 Customer Reliability & Safety enable operators and managers to understand the impact that actual and potential outages, asset failures, and grid investments can have on their customer base.
With this insight, utilities can proactively address reliability concerns with individual customers in mind. Utilities are able to effectively and specifically communicate with their customers about reliability and service history, as well as identify regions at high risk of failure due to historical underinvestment. This includes communications regarding planned outages, outage restoration efforts, or the positive impacts of targeted grid investments.
Utilities can also better target demand response and energy efficiency efforts toward vulnerable areas.
C3 Grid Investment Planning provides utilities with an enterprise-wide framework to effectively evaluate capital investment alternatives and strategically assess competing priorities.
C3 Grid Investment Planning ranks grid investment portfolio alternatives based on a cash flow analysis and impact to system and customer reliability, and helps build informed business cases for asset replacement. Integrating system risk and customer reliability criteria into the development of multi-year investment and expense pipelines helps maximize limited resources while delivering on performance objectives.
C3 Grid Investment Planning reduces operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses and helps optimize capital expenditures by directing investments to the circuits that are at the greatest risk of outage.
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) — and the 60-second and 15-minute interval data enabled by smart meters — offers utilities the opportunity to gain new insights into both the health of grid assets and the quality of the customer experience.
C3 AMI Operations provides utility operators with the analytics necessary to capitalize on AMI data and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their smart meter systems.
C3 AMI Operations works with a utility-s existing workforce management tools to both streamline the deployment and logistics of new AMI systems and improve the operational health of existing systems. Functionality includes: identifying meter software/firmware issues; diagnosing physical meter and communications issues; and streamlining processes to resolve work orders.
Utility operators benefit from improved operator and worker productivity, increased billing accuracy from smart meters, increased revenue, reduced costs, less downtime, fewer system failures, and improved customer satisfaction.
C3 Asset and System Risk, C3 Customer Reliability and Safety, C3 Grid Investment Planning and C3 AMI Operations will be available for production deployment in Summer 2013.
C3 Energy is an enterprise application software company that harnesses the power of big data, smart grid analytics, social networking, and cloud computing to improve the safety, reliability, and efficiency of power delivery. C3 Energy-s family of utility-tested and proven smart grid analytics products deliver end-to-end solutions across the entire smart grid, from energy grid capital asset allocation, transmission, distribution, and advanced metering, to the customer experience and energy efficiency programs. C3 Energy products enable utility operators to realize the full benefit of their smart grid and energy system investments. Contact: .
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