Omaha Public Power District is forging ahead with major technology upgrades that will benefit customers. At a recent board of directors committee meeting, OPPD staff outlined the work under way to transition to advanced metering infrastructure.
When fully implemented over the next few years, AMI and its surrounding ecosystem will help OPPD identify and pinpoint outages faster and with greater precision. New customer meters will send outage information to OPPD automatically, without the need for customer reporting.
The utility plans to test the technology with nearly 12,000 customers through a pilot program later this year. OPPD will communicate those next steps with customers in the coming months.
Related technology upgrades will include a new, interactive outage map with more detail about the cause of local outages, estimated restoration times and restoration progress. Individual customer outage information will remain private. The Nebraska public power utility is also working on an improved customer platform with useful information and automatic texting and email notifications.
OPPD has been testing the technology and ran more than 4,000 test cases in 2024 to fine-tune the various new programs, said Matt Hardebeck, OPPD’s director of customer experience and operations.
“We’re validating everything to ensure we get it right,” Hardebeck said. “There’s a lot of people involved in this process.”
OPPD also has the advantage of learning from other utilities around the country that have already adopted the technology.
“We’ve been able to leverage a lot of those best practices,” Hardebeck said.
