It’s Memorial Day 2022, and while you are outside sweating over the grill preparing your fan favorites, your family and friends are anxiously awaiting your creations inside your comfortably air-conditioned house. As you begin to plate the food, you hear a loud “pop” in the distance and your A/C, which has been humming all day, immediately shuts off. But before your house warms to an uncomfortable temperature and starts heating up your guests, PSE&G’s new “sensor-to-wrench” technology already has alerted and dispatched the nearest repair crew to the location of the problem. The future is near!
Over the next two years, PSE&G will be making its smart grid even smarter to further increase our ability to keep your power on, support clean energy initiatives and to proactively get you useful information that can make your life easier. PSE&G is undertaking a technology transformation that involves about a dozen major computing systems with a focus on practical solutions – like one-touch apps.
Enhancing Reliability
PSE&G’s technology transformation also builds upon the work of our Energy Strong initiative, which added thousands of smart devices to the grid with about 8,000 more being added by 2023. These devices are helping minimize power outages and restoring them much faster when they do occur. We are building a seamless, technologically advanced system that facilitates improved data sharing and collaboration within PSE&G to support the easiest, most reliable interactions for our customers and employees.
New Tools Benefit Customers
Today, our engineers spend time performing “detective work” to track down the cause of an outage. Tomorrow an app, currently under development, will help pinpoint the exact location of damaged equipment – quickly leading repair crews directly to where work needs to be done. This app will allow employees to do in mere seconds the work that used to take 10 minutes or more, thus further speeding restorations.
Similar technology enhancements will enable proactive monitoring of the hundreds of thousands of streetlights in PSE&G’s service area for better maintenance and planning for future growth. Other technologies will consolidate our planning process to help us utilize our resources more wisely and get more done in less time.
PSE&G is on the cusp of being able to proactively notify you about unplanned events that disrupt your power and your life. Also, we will deploy new, simple apps that keep you informed of utility construction work being performed in your neighborhood. Our customers will continue to make repair appointments – but now track the repair progress each step of the way.
Supporting the Environment
Having instant access to information about what’s happening, even at the smallest points on our grid, opens the door for improvements that support PSE&G’s sustainability priorities, such as targeted tree-trimming practices, safety enhancements and fewer truck emissions. For example, digital images from a technology called LiDAR, which operates on the same principles for land-based objects as radar does for aircraft, will soon enhance our approach to vegetation management, preventative maintenance and storm recovery.
Advanced Technology
Having a fully integrated platform that has easy and intuitive user interfaces allows us to take advantage of robotic process automation and, eventually, artificial intelligence and machine learning. These advances will not replace our employees, but, instead, it will allow them to focus on the aspects of their work that computers will never be able to do, such as strategic planning and innovation.
Today’s investments are paving the way for a better experience – supporting energy efficiency efforts to save you money, protecting our environment, charging the electric vehicle you’ll one day drive, and integrating smart devices into our grid that help restore power faster than ever.