Every day people go about their business without giving thought to the power behind a flipped light switch or a busy computer—until an outage temporarily ceases daily routines or throws whole communities into the dark.

Utilities all over the world use GIS to help maintain and manage their operations in a coordinated, efficient way. Geography is one of the factors that enables utilities to maintain transmission lines, build and operate power stations, and respond to emergencies.

Electric companies use GIS software applications throughout the organization. Custom-designed interfaces reduce costs of data maintenance and increase the level of data integrity. When zones, addresses, or city limits change, the information is easily updated in a GIS database.

Location information is not the only type of information that continually changes. GIS also increases the ability of the electric utility to visually obtain and verify equipment information, which helps forecast and schedule the material, labor, and additional equipment needed for a given project.

For service restoration operations, GIS can be used to quickly locate and respond to a trouble call or communicate vital information to customers in an outage situation. Before an electric company can notify communities about a power outage, GIS enables it to group incidents based on location, which can point out the troubled transformer and the devices that have caused the incident. Once the incident is recorded, it can be grouped with other possible incidents and repair crews can be quickly dispatched to remedy the situation. In addition to helping determine the cause of an outage and what will correct it, GIS-based systems are used to dispatch service crews and monitor the status of repair activities in the field.

The stories in this section are examples of how utility companies use GIS technology to ensure the comfort, safety, and daily routines of communities around the world.

For more information, visit www.esri.com/electric.