Real-time visibility across a national power grid

Pacific Northwest Electric serves 1.4 million customers across two states. For years, grid operators worked from a patchwork of vendor dashboards — each accurate in isolation, none complete enough to trust during a storm. When a February ice event knocked out 47 feeders in six hours, dispatchers spent the first ninety minutes on the phone reconciling conflicting maps.

The challenge: three systems, one emergency

Elena Vasquez had been Director of Grid Operations for eleven months when the ice storm hit. Her team could see breaker status in one tool, crew locations in another, and customer outage reports in a third. Field supervisors carried printed feeder maps because the mobile app lagged behind SCADA by twenty minutes.

We had talented people making good decisions with bad information. The grid did not fail us — our visibility did.

Building a shared control plane

Netisen worked with PNW Electric over fourteen months to unify telemetry, GIS, and crew dispatch on a single platform. The rollout was phased by substation region so operators could train on live data without a big-bang cutover. Edge collectors normalized vendor protocols at the substation level, reducing the load on central systems during peak events.

• Unified outage map with sub-minute SCADA refresh across all feeders
• Mobile field app with the same topology operators see in the control room
• Predictive alerts for transformer loading based on weather and historical patterns
• Automated customer notification triggers tied to confirmed breaker operations

What changed for crews on the ground

Line supervisor Marcus Okonkwo runs a crew of twelve out of the Salem district. Before the platform went live, his mornings started with a radio check and a paper map marked up from the previous shift. Now his tablet shows the same feeder state the control room sees — including which customers are affected and which switches his crew is cleared to operate.

The next major weather event came in October. This time, dispatchers identified the fault corridor within twelve minutes. Crews were pre-staged before customer calls peaked. PNW Electric restored 94% of affected customers within the first restoration window — a metric they had missed in three of the prior five storm seasons.