Andrew Barrington

For most people, flipping a power switch is an unconscious act, yet it takes calculated effort by utilities to provide reliable power for millions of diverse energy habits and needs. This balance is only growing more complicated, and utilities are faced with making thousands of critical decisions across multiple teams and systems every day.

What if there was a way to better understand how storms could impact an electric utility’s service territory 72 hours — three days — in advance? Avista asked that question as it was experiencing increasingly intense and disruptive storms in its Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho electric service areas, which include regions where it also supplies natural gas.