Storm Center Goes Live at Progress Energy

Storm Center, a Microsoft Virtual Earth-based solution, has been deployed at Progress Energy for each of their service territories in North/South Carolina and Florida. Storm Center provides real-time reports on power outages (including both planned maintenance outages and unplanned outages caused by storms, traffic accidents or equipment failure). It is available seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Carolinas: http://www.progress-energy.com/shared/outages/car/index.html
Florida: http://www.progress-energy.com/shared/outages/fla/index.html

Outage information is displayed down to city and town detail, including information such as the number of customers affected, the time the outage occurred and an estimated time power will be restored. To protect customer privacy and security, the outage map tool does not display outage views to a specific street address.

During major outage events, such as storms, Storm Center presents outages by county -- highlighted in yellow shades, based on severity. Outage information is available and valuable to counties' Emergency Operations Centers during storms. The outage maps do not include the causes of outages. Power outages occur for many reasons. Leading causes are lightning or other weather, tree limbs and animals.

"Our job is to maintain a reliable system for our customers and ensure that power interruptions are rare," said Jeff Corbett, senior vice president of Energy Delivery for Progress Energy Florida. "But when they do occur, we are committed not only to restoring service as quickly and safely as possible, but also to providing information that is useful to our customers, in as many forms as possible."

About iFactor Consulting
iFactor Consulting is a software consulting services company renowned for its expertise in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Outage Management Systems (OMS). Its home page is www.ifactorconsulting.com