Join us for our 15th annual PowerUp: Chartwell’s Outage Conference

By Russ Henderson, Senior Research Manager –

It’s hard to believe, but PowerUp: Chartwell’s Outage Conference is just two weeks away. We will be virtual this year, so there is still time to register.

PowerUp is the largest and most informative conference of its kind in the industry, and the agenda for this year’s event June 8-9 is one of our our best ever.

Entergy will serve as our first-day keynote, and is also the winner of Chartwell’s Gold Best Practices in Outage Communications Award this year for its outage restoration messaging improvements, which enabled the utility to offer consistent, reliable communications to its customers during a record hurricane season. The company partnered with Message Broadcast to send continuous proactive communications before, during and after each event using outbound voice calls, SMS and MMS message flows, and emails.

Our second-day keynote will come from Southern California Edison, who this year will take home our Sustained Leadership in Outage Communications Award for the utility’s longtime commitment to ongoing improvements. SCE improved its net scores for maintenance and repair outages in a year filled with seemingly endless disasters and uncertainties including drought, wildfires and near-constant activation for public safety power shutoff communications.

Alabama Power will present on the Gold Outage Restoration Award-winning enhancements the company made to leverage the company’s Automated Meter Infrastructure (AMI) and Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS). During the active 2020 hurricane season the system improvements allowed the utility to verify that power had been restored for all customers in areas that had been severely damaged before releasing crews, ensuring that customers experienced shorter outage times.

Also on the agenda are AEP’s leading work with voice assistants for outages; Ameren’s “empathy alerts” designed to make customer feel informed about outages even when new information is scarce; DTE’s integration of customer feedback in the nested outage restoration process; PG&E’s dynamic improvements of wildfire and shutoff communications; Alabama Power’s groundbreaking, homegrown outage messaging system; TECO’s award-winning communications and restoration improvement efforts; lessons learned from the Texas power crisis, and much more.

The agenda features every single utility that won our 2021 Chartwell Best Practices Awards in Outage Communications and Restoration.

No one knows outage communications and restoration better than Chartwell and its community of utility experts. Our research, events and unique peer networking model have helped utilities become and remain leaders in outage communications for well over a decade.

PowerUp 2021 registrations have already broken all previous records, and more are registering every day.

We look forward to seeing you there! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.