Puget Sound Energy: GIS Mapping Tool

Deck: 

Top Innovators

Fortnightly Magazine - October 2024
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Puget Sound Energy won the Fortnightly Top Innovator 2024 award ''Charles Steinmetz Top Innovator in Grid or Network Solutions'' for its GIS Mapping Tool.

 

PUF's Steve Mitnick: Describe the innovation and its positive impact.

Jennifer Boyer: Every utility is dealing with a massive amount of data and trying to figure out, how do we make good decisions based on it? It's hard to figure out how to bring those things together.

I'm an engineer by trade, and we like to bring things together in spreadsheets, and how many pivot tables can I layer on pivot tables to combine and compare? Until now, we've not had any sophisticated tool that can do that in a geographic way.

When Lauren and Matt started bringing this data together in one place, geographically, it blows your mind what you can see when you start overlaying. This makes it obvious where there are areas we can focus on strategically.

They've delved into a couple of use cases so far to empower our system planning team, but there are so many use cases that we can start using this tool for. We have huge plans, huge goals with limited resources.

How do we act in the most strategic way with our dollars, which are going to be the most impactful for our customers? It's being able to effectively and efficiently use the resources we have to positively impact our customers.

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