$7 Billion.
This is the annual cost U.S. utilities spend on truck rolls to locate and respond to grid faults; across 2.3 million events, every year. The question worth asking is how much of it is recoverable.
Fault location on a distribution network is fundamentally a measurement challenge. The more precisely electrical behavior can be captured at the conductor level; voltage, current, phase, timing, and the faster that data resolves into a coordinate, the more directly a crew can respond. On-conductor sensors that simultaneously capture over 40 electrical, physical, and environmental parameters, GPS-timestamped in real time, a fault can be located within a single pole span in seconds. The crew receives a precise location before leaving the yard and drives directly to it.
The operational implication is significant. Total consumer outage time compresses dramatically. And at the scale of 2.3 million annual fault events across the U.S., even a substantial reduction in patrol time translates into a financial opportunity that utility finance teams, operations leaders, and regulators are all positioned to care about, for different but equally compelling reasons.
For utility executives, the conversation is about where efficiency gains of this magnitude sit in the context of an energy agenda centered on affordability and grid resilience. SAIDI reached 11.0 hours per customer in 2024. Reliability improvement that is measurable within weeks of deployment, on a live feeder with no planned outage, generates a very different kind of return on attention than traditional infrastructure investment, and a very different conversation with regulators.
For operations and engineering teams, the conversation is about evidence. How does single-span location accuracy perform across different fault types? How does the system handle feeder topologies it has never been calibrated against? What does phase-level performance data look like under genuinely blind conditions, with no advance knowledge of where the fault was placed? These are the questions that separate a credible capability from an interesting claim, and they deserve precise, independently validated answers.
EGM’s Accurate Fault Location and Detection technology has been evaluated in exactly those conditions. The results are specific enough that both audiences, the leader weighing the financial case and the engineer stress-testing the methodology, will find what they need to form a considered view.
Evaluated by a national, vendor-neutral laboratory, across independently executed blind scenarios — zero advance knowledge of fault locations, results back-tested against actual recorded positions.
“Every hour spent searching for a fault is an hour customers are without power and an hour the utility is burning operational dollars. When you can put a crew on the fault within a span, you are not just improving SAIDI, you are delivering the kind of reliability that customers expect and that regulators are increasingly demanding.” — Mike Spoor, former Florida Power and Light T&D Executive, EGM Board Member
One question worth taking into the report
What portion of that $7 Billion sits on your network and what would recovering it actually require?
The full evaluation methodology, performance data, deployment economics, and financial case are inside. Written for the utility leader and the engineer reading it at the same table.