A world-first CitiPower and Powercor project that identifies unplanned outages before customers call in the fault has won the Innovation category award at the prestigious Australian Business Awards 2014.
The Meter Outage Notification (MON) system, which has been described as a “game changer” for the way industry manages faults and outage identification and restoration, utilises smart meter technology to notify the business of outages.
The system, which identifies voltage variations in a customer’s system and sends a “last gasp” signal back to the business when the power is about to be lost, assists in reducing the duration of power outages and saves the business money through greater efficiency.
MON came into service in May 2013 and has saved CitiPower and Powercor about $7 million in the year since.
The Australian Business Awards is a highly regarded national program with an established set of business and product award categories assessing the core values of business excellence, product excellence, sustainability and responsibility.
This year’s award follows a win in the same category last year for our embedded “Innovation@” framework, which promotes and nurtures innovative ideas around the business.
MON project manager, Luke Skinner, said the ABA100 Innovation category award was tremendous recognition of the work done by his project team.
“CitiPower and Powercor has a long history of innovation and endeavour and this award is welcome recognition of our efforts,” Mr Skinner said.
“Since the establishment of the Innovation strategy at CitiPower and Powercor we have implemented hundreds of innovations that will create added value for our customers and their communities.
“The world-first MON project benefits both our business and our customers by being able to detect the exact time of the outage, pinpoint its exact location, identify the exact time of restoration and reduce the need for field crews to undertake outage investigations.”
Mr Skinner thanked external stakeholder GE and Silver Spring Networks for their support in the MON project.
The ABA100 program engages with leading corporate, government and non-government organisations across key industry segments, including financial, manufacturing, professional services, energy, telecommunications, construction, transport, healthcare, education, food services and retail.
