The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Energy have launched a call to action urging electric utilities and their data system partners to take part in a national initiative by providing standardized power outage data.
DOE’s Outage Data Initiative Nationwide was established through a public-private partnership over the last eight years and is backed by over 60 electric utilities in 26 states, according to a White House blog post published Tuesday.
Denice Ross, U.S. chief data scientist at OSTP, co-wrote the blog post with Tom Wilson, assistant director for electricity at OSTP, and Chris Irwin, program manager at DOE’s office of electricity.
The ODIN data standards seek to facilitate data sharing to provide local emergency responders visibility into outages, speed up response times and save lives.
OSTP and DOE are encouraging utilities to use the ODIN standards to share data by Dec. 9.
The two agencies will announce the utility companies that have made ODIN data sharing commitments at the White House Electrification Summit on Dec. 14.
