Use Case 03 · Energy

Grid Operations & Outage Communications

During planned and unplanned outages, control room teams must simultaneously manage technical remediation and produce a high volume of stakeholder communications — to customers, regulators, local authorities, and media — under severe time pressure.

The Challenge

Why This Happens

Outage communications require parallel drafting for multiple audiences with technically accurate, audience-appropriate language issued at specific regulatory intervals. This process is improvised due to absence of integrated templates and automation, leaving control room teams to manage both remediation and communications simultaneously.

How Copilot & M365 Address This
  1. 1Audience-specific communications drafted instantlyCopilot drafts audience-specific outage communications from structured incident data using SharePoint templates for each stakeholder group.
  2. 2Real-time coordination in TeamsTeams channel manages real-time coordination between control room and communications teams — single source of truth during incidents.
  3. 3Customer notifications triggered by postcodePower Automate triggers notification workflows to customer segments by affected postcode — automatic and accurate.
  4. 4Technical logs converted to public statementsCopilot synthesises technical logs into plain-language public statements for media use — no communication team bottleneck.

Impact & Results

Impact Metrics
47→12 minFirst customer notification time
3xCommunication volume per incident
78→100%Regulatory notification compliance
Measured via: Incident management system timestamps. Regulator notification records. Customer CSAT during outage events (IVR survey, n=8,000).
“

During the January storm we had 45 simultaneous outages. In the past that meant complete chaos for our communications team. This time Copilot generated status updates, customer messages, and council notifications simultaneously while my engineers focused on the network.

PH
Phil Hastings
Operations Director, UK Power Network

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Use Case 06

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