JUNO BEACH, Fla. — Florida Power & Light Company’s (FPL) proactive ticket notification system earned national recognition as Chartwell’s 12th Annual Best Practices Awards “Gold Outage Communications” winner. Chartwell made the announcement at its Energy Marketing and Customer Service (EMACS) – The Customer Experience Conference, in Orlando, Fla. FPL took home the gold with its new proactive ticket notification system, a patent-pending process that leverages smart grid technology to intelligently predict future individual customer outages days in advance.
“At FPL, we are building a stronger, smarter energy grid with which to deliver electricity our customers can count on in good weather and bad,” said Eric Silagy, president and CEO for FPL. “Our team is continuously looking for ways to leverage smart grid technology and information from our more than 4.8 million smart meters and thousands of intelligent devices across the grid to monitor the health of the system. This revolutionary predictive process is an example of our continued thirst for innovation resulting in electric service reliability that is the best in Florida and among the best in the nation. And most recently during Hurricane Matthew, smart grid automated switches on FPL poles and wires prevented more than 118,000 outages, further validating that these smart grid investments are benefiting our customers.”
FPL is the most reliable energy company in Florida and is recognized as having the best comprehensive service reliability in the nation – nearly 50 percent better than the national average. In 2015, it delivered its best-ever service reliability, reducing outages to the lowest rate on record thanks to its continued investments in smart grid technology.
FPL’s proactive ticket notification system uses smart grid data to predict when a customer is about to experience an outage, enabling crews to proactively deploy to an affected area and, in many cases, resolve the issue before a customer is even aware he or she had a problem. Through the prediction and repair of intermittent power outages, the company avoided more than 3,000 single customer outages in 2015. For these respective outages, the award-winning technology decreased the average interruption duration by approximately 50 minutes, and achieved 70 percent cost savings as a result of less outage-related wait and travel time.
“It’s an honor to see our team’s exceptional work receive such recognition,” said Manny Miranda, senior vice president of Power Delivery for FPL. “This predictive technology is game changing, as it allows us to provide improved service reliability and a better customer experience by preventing longer unplanned outages and reducing response time for repairs when outages occur. It’s part of our continued commitment to deliver reliable service to our customers year-round.”
Chartwell’s Best Practices Awards recognize excellence among electric and gas utilities with respect to projects, programs and service initiatives. The categories include Billing and Payment Programs, Communications, Customer Service, Outage Communications and Program Marketing. FPL also received Chartwell’s Best Practices Outage Communication Award in 2014 for its mobile-enabled Restoration Spatial View tool.
For more information, visit FPL.com/SmartGrid.
Florida Power & Light Company
Florida Power & Light Company is the third-largest electric utility in the United States, serving more than 4.8 million customer accounts or more than 10 million people across nearly half of the state of Florida. FPL's typical 1,000-kWh residential customer bill is approximately 30 percent lower than the latest national average and, in 2015, was the lowest in Florida among reporting utilities for the sixth year in a row. FPL's service reliability is better than 99.98 percent, and its highly fuel-efficient power plant fleet is one of the cleanest among all utilities nationwide. The company received the top ranking in the southern U.S. among large electric providers, according to the J.D. Power 2016 Electric Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction StudySM, and was recognized in 2016 as one of the most trusted U.S. electric utilities by Market Strategies International. A leading Florida employer with approximately 8,800 employees, FPL is a subsidiary of Juno Beach, Fla.-based NextEra Energy, Inc. (NYSE: NEE), a clean energy company widely recognized for its efforts in sustainability, ethics and diversity, and has been ranked No. 1 in the electric and gas utilities industry in Fortune's 2016 list of "World's Most Admired Companies." NextEra Energy is also the parent company of NextEra Energy Resources, LLC, which, together with its affiliated entities, is the world's largest generator of renewable energy from the wind and sun. For more information about NextEra Energy companies, visit these websites: www.NextEraEnergy.com, www.FPL.com, www.NextEraEnergyResources.com.
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