What are the benefits and importance of GIS in electrical power distribution?

Answer 1

One of the core components of maintaining electric infrastructure is the ability to quickly respond to outages. This is where GIS can be beneficial in a number of ways. First, many electric-specific GIS models from vendors like Esri and Schneider have the ability to trace outages and identify affected citizens and businesses "downstream" from an outage. This could not be done if the network wasn't modeled in a spatial database. Also, having your infrastructure mapped and stored in GIS can help linemen respond to that outage quicker by knowing exactly what pole or transformer has been affected on a digital, real-time map and be able to quickly route to that asset.