How Orlando Utilities Commission Prevents Outages with Real-Time Transformer Monitoring

Orlando Utilities Commission (OUC) — the municipal utility serving 400,000+ metered customers across central Florida — uses Ubicquia's UbiGrid DTM+ sensors to detect load spikes, voltage disturbances, and thermal anomalies at individual distribution transformers in real time. The result: outages prevented before they occur, and faults diagnosed remotely instead of dispatched to.

OUC serves the Orlando/Orange County and St. Cloud/Osceola County area, including 32,000 commercial and industrial (C&I) customers — large-scale manufacturers, healthcare facilities, and an international airport among them. The utility is proud of a reliability track record that has withstood repeated hurricanes and tropical storms. But in 2022, one of its C&I customers started experiencing unexplained outages that traditional monitoring couldn't diagnose.

The challenge: outages with no apparent cause

A large manufacturing plant on OUC's grid operated a well-designed system of three dedicated underground feeders and 10 three-phase transformers. In 2022, the facility began experiencing outages and low-voltage events with no apparent cause. Three transformers blew. Standard smart-meter data — reported in 15-minute intervals — wasn't granular enough to pinpoint which transformers were being overloaded or why.

An on-site visit revealed the answer: the customer had installed an 800-horsepower compressor and wired an entire process line to a fully loaded transformer. The compressor pushed the transformer past its current rating, blowing bayonet fuses. Without continuous visibility, OUC engineers couldn't have identified the load pattern remotely.

The solution: real-time visibility with UbiGrid DTM+

OUC installed UbiGrid DTM+ sensors and the UbiVu AI-driven asset management platform on the three overloaded transformers. The sensors captured voltage and current data thousands of times per second, along with oil temperature and pressure, and streamed the data to OUC's operations team via LTE. Load profiles, current spikes, sags, and harmonics all became visible in real time — long before they could damage equipment or interrupt the customer's operations.

What real-time visibility meant for OUC and its customer

The proof came during the 2023 holiday season. An outage that would have previously required diagnostic truck rolls was instead diagnosed remotely by OUC staff, who identified the exact transformer and circuit affected from the UbiVu dashboard. A single field technician was dispatched with the right part; the bayonet fuse was quickly replaced. Restoration was faster for the customer, and OUC avoided the unnecessary man-hours of a broader diagnostic response.

The manufacturing customer kept their operations running through the outage window with minimal disruption. Ubicquia's DTM+ and UbiVu didn't just prevent outages — they gave OUC's engineers the confidence to serve their most critical C&I accounts even when unusual load patterns appear.