OREANDA-NEWS. Itron, Inc. (NASDAQ: ITRI), a world-leading technology and services company dedicated to the resourceful use of energy and water, announced today that Otter Tail Power Company, an investor-owned utility that provides electricity to customers in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, has signed a contract with Itron to modernize and improve the reliability of its electric grid. The utility will take advantage of Itron Total Outcomes, a complete managed services offering using Itron technology and analytics to deliver needed outcomes. In Otter Tail Power Company's case, the utility needs greater awareness of service interruptions across its territory to improve reliability.

Otter Tail Power Company continuously works to improve grid reliability and wants to be as efficient as possible with its restoration efforts. To help with this, Itron will manage reliability analytics on behalf of the utility, using information from Itron's OpenWay smart grid solution with cellular communications. Itron will then notify operators when interruptions occur as well as pinpoint the circuits, phases and number of customers involved. This will empower the utility to proactively improve overall reliability, outage response and customer satisfaction.

Otter Tail Power Company will also perform historic outage analysis and measure restoration performance. This enables operators to identify poorly performing feeders and prioritize budget allocation for infrastructure improvements and maintenance.

"Otter Tail Power Company was looking to replace our aging interruption monitoring system with an Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI)-based offering that provides both historic and real-time outage analytics and voltage monitoring capabilities on a single platform. We found that with Itron, we'll have the technology and a team of experts to quickly get the system up and running and provide results," said Rod Jensen, P.E., reliability engineer at Otter Tail Power Company. "With Itron's help, we will be able to improve reliability while determining where to place resources for vegetation management and infrastructure improvements."

About Itron

Itron is a world-leading technology and services company dedicated to the resourceful use of energy and water. We provide comprehensive solutions that measure, manage and analyze energy and water. Our broad product portfolio includes electricity, gas, water and thermal energy measurement devices and control technology; communications systems; software; as well as managed and consulting services. With thousands of employees supporting nearly 8,000 customers in more than 100 countries, Itron applies knowledge and technology to better manage energy and water resources.