How improved emergency preparedness and building repositories of organisational expertise can help utilise dwindling resources more efficiently
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, September 7, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — In articles published on Business Reporter, Itron talks about how utilities must improve both the way they respond to emergencies and how they preserve expertise. Increasingly severe weather, workforce shortages, retirements and growing grid complexity are creating unprecedented execution risks for utilities. Customers expect faster restoration, while regulators demand greater transparency and accountability. At the same time, experienced workers are leaving the workforce, taking decades of operational knowledge with them.
Traditional, fragmented storm operations – with forecasting, resource planning, restoration and financial recovery managed across separate systems – limit visibility and slow down decision-making. A more proactive operating model should focus on three capabilities: preparing earlier, securing resources faster and coordinating the entire storm lifecycle. Utilities that have already successfully adopted the new model include American Electric Power, whose Storm Outage Prediction Model helps anticipate outage locations, customer impacts and infrastructure damage, and the National Grid, which secured 200 line crews in 19 minutes during Winter Storm Finn after evaluating more than 800 available crews.
Safety provides another foundation for operational resilience. Job briefings, field observations, tailboard discussions, hazard assessments and near-miss reviews capture how experienced workers recognise risks, adapt to conditions and make decisions. Digitally documenting these activities transforms individual expertise into organisational knowledge. Repositories of field-tested practices, lessons learned and risk insights can be shared across crews, supervisors and contractors, improving consistency, decision-making, onboarding and training while reducing execution variability.
By connecting storm response with knowledge management, utilities can create a single, integrated approach to resilience—combining earlier preparation, faster resource coordination, end-to-end visibility and the preservation of operational expertise to improve restoration, control costs and strengthen performance as industry pressures intensify.
To learn more about how a new emergency response and knowledge management model can improve utilities’ resilience, click here and here.
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About Itron
Itron enables utilities and cities to safely, securely and reliably deliver critical infrastructure services to communities in more than a hundred countries. Its proven portfolio of smart networks, software, services, meters and sensors helps its customers better manage energy and water for the people they serve.
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