Portland General Electric Delivers Exceptional Customer Experiences on AWS

Portland General Electric (PGE) is a regulated, investor-owned utility that has operated out of Portland, Oregon for over 130 years. It supplies electricity to 51 cities and serves approximately 900,000 customers in a service area populated by 2 million Oregonians. In 2019, PGE realized that its on-premises IT systems alone could no longer support its evolving customer base and corporate data needs.

To increase its innovation speed and help PGE accelerate Oregon’s transition to clean energy, the company chose to migrate to a hybrid on-premises/cloud model on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using services such as Amazon DynamoDB, which is a fully managed high performance database. To centralize access to its data, PGE built a data lake powered by AWS services such as AWS Database Migration Service, which helps migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. To improve energy loss detection, PGE built an advanced analytics solution in the data lake, using AWS services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which provides object storage through a web service interface.

PGE also uses predictive analytics on AWS to predict outages and failures before they occur. To proactively notify customers about outages and manage the process of providing them with accurate notifications of estimated time to repair, PGE built a machine learning model using Amazon SageMaker, which helps data scientists and developers to prepare, build, train, and deploy high-quality models quickly.

To hear the full story, bookmark and watch PGE’s recent presentation at AWS re:Invent 2020.

Clean Energy for Customers: The Climate Pledge

Like its customers, PGE is committed to a greener future. PGE is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with its electric service by at least 80% by 2030, and PGE aims to achieve companywide net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. Today, PGE announced its commitment to The Climate Pledge, a cross-sector community of companies, organizations, individuals, and partners working together to crack the climate crisis and solve the challenges of decarbonizing our economy. Bringing together those that are prepared to run the furthest and fastest, The Climate Pledge calls on signatories to reach net zero-carbon emissions by 2040—10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge with Global Optimism in 2019, and became the first signatory of the pledge.

Learn more about how PGE leverages AWS to meet its goals in this short video. Learn more about PGE’s climate goals, or visit Sustainability for AWS Power & Utilities.