Geospatial Transformation of Outage Management through GIS platform: Enhancing Communication and Coordination for NB Power

NB Power, serving over 350,000 customers in New Brunswick, Canada, faced significant communication challenges during power outages, particularly after severe storms in 2013 and 2014. Traditional text-based outage updates from their management system were cumbersome and inefficient, leading to high operational costs for call centers and customer dissatisfaction. Recognizing the need for better outage communication, NB Power leveraged ArcGIS Online to develop two geospatial solutions: a public outage web map and an internal outage coordination map.

The public map, accessible to customers, municipalities, and the media, updates every 10 minutes and provides a geographic representation of outage areas. This shift from static tabular data to dynamic mapping made it easier for customers to understand the scope and status of outages. Simultaneously, the internal map enables streamlined storm planning and field crew coordination by displaying detailed asset views and clustering priority areas for dispatch. During the next major storm, the public web map handled over 1.2 million visits in just 24 hours, demonstrating its reliability and utility during peak demand.