Predictive Grid Management: How Datapro Helped a Regional Utility Prevent Outages and Optimize Maintenance with AI

Overview:
A mid-sized electric utility provider serving over 3 million customers faced growing pressure to modernize grid operations. Aging infrastructure, unpredictable load patterns, and increasing weather-related events were driving maintenance costs up and reliability down.

The Challenge:

• Reactive maintenance led to costly, unplanned outages.
  
  
• Asset inspections were manual, infrequent, and error-prone.
  
  
• Real-time data existed, but was siloed across SCADA, IoT sensors, and enterprise systems.
  
  
• Regulatory pressure to reduce SAIDI/SAIFI scores and improve customer satisfaction.
  
  

The Datapro Approach:
Datapro partnered with the utility to design and implement a predictive maintenance and outage prevention platform using AI-powered analytics and custom software.

Step 1: Unified Data Layer
We built a secure, scalable data pipeline to ingest and normalize telemetry from:

• Smart meters
  
  
• Grid sensors
  
  
• SCADA systems
  
  
• Work order and asset history
  
  
• Weather feeds
  
  

This created a clean, structured dataset that enabled real-time monitoring and long-term trend analysis.

Step 2: AI Models for Asset Risk Scoring
Datapro developed ML models to:

• Predict likelihood of transformer or line failure based on heat, load cycles, and past performance.
  
  
• Prioritize inspections and replacements based on location-specific risks (e.g., storm zones, vegetation proximity).
  
  
• Detects anomalies in voltage/load fluctuations before they become incidents.
  
  

Step 3: Mobile Interface for Field Teams
To close the loop, Datapro built a mobile-first application for maintenance crews:

• AI-generated job priorities and route optimization
  
  
• Digital inspection checklists and voice-to-text entry
  
  
• Offline sync for rural access
  
  

Results:

• 27% reduction in unplanned maintenance events within 6 months
  
  
• 3x improvement in mean time between failure (MTBF) for aging transformers
  
  
• 22% cost reduction in field operations through optimized dispatching
  
  
• Improved regulatory compliance and customer satisfaction
  
  

Why It Worked:
Unlike traditional software vendors, Datapro is embedded with field and operations teams to deeply understand workflows and constraints. Our agile, modular approach enabled rapid iteration with real-time feedback from technicians and operators.