NSTAR Awarded $10 Million in Federal Stimulus Funds to Enhance Electric Reliability

NSTAR teams up with GE Energy to reduce power outages and restore service faster

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The U.S. Department of Energy today awarded NSTAR Electric $10 million in federal stimulus funding to advance the roll-out of the company’s electric grid “self-healing” project. By utilizing GE’s smart grid technologies, NSTAR will further-improve service reliability by reducing the extent, frequency and duration of customer outages. NSTAR already has one of the largest automated systems in the country and this project will serve to modernize more of the grid in its service territory.

“While there is nothing we can do to control the weather, we can certainly take control of how we deal with its effects”

“These stimulus dollars from the Department of Energy provide us with the opportunity to build upon NSTAR’s previous Smart Grid investments so we can continue to deliver increasingly reliable service to our customers,” said Tom May, NSTAR Chairman, President and CEO. “We’ve demonstrated this technology works, and now we’re ready for a larger scale deployment to help build the electric grid of the future.”

Today, utilities often have to rely on customer phone calls to learn of power outages, and then must send work crews to the site to restore power. With a smarter grid, NSTAR can automatically isolate the outage, reroute power around the outage, and even correct some outages without ever having to deploy a truck or crew. Customers will have fewer and shorter outages. The system combines detection, assessment, decision support and network control to automatically reroute power around outages – limiting the households affected to those closest to the damaged equipment.

“While there is nothing we can do to control the weather, we can certainly take control of how we deal with its effects,” said Bob Gilligan, vice president of GE Energy’s transmission and distribution business. “GE’s smart grid solutions will help manage and control NSTAR’s system to maintain and restore more power to more people – even while a storm is still going strong. That’s the revolutionary level of service improvements smart grid can deliver.”

Customers whose power can’t be restored remotely can still see shorter outage times, as the system analyzes the outage causes and immediately dispatches the best resources to fix the problem. NSTAR customers can learn more about how smart grid technology works by watching the video available at: http://www.itsyoursmartgrid.com/solutions/minimizing_impact.html.

About NSTAR

NSTAR is the largest Massachusetts-based, investor-owned electric and gas utility. The company transmits and delivers electricity and natural gas to 1.4 million customers in Eastern and Central Massachusetts, including more than one million electric customers in 81 communities and 300,000 gas customers in 51 communities. For more information, visit www.nstar.com.

About GE Energy

GE Energy (www.ge.com/energy) is one of the world’s leading suppliers of power generation and energy delivery technologies, with 2008 revenue of $29.3 billion. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, GE Energy works in all areas of the energy industry including coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear energy; renewable resources such as water, wind, solar and biogas; and other alternative fuels. Numerous GE Energy products are certified under ecomagination, GE’s corporate-wide initiative to aggressively bring to market new technologies that will help customers meet pressing environmental challenges.

About GE

GE is a diversified global infrastructure, finance and media company that is built to meet essential world needs. From energy, water, transportation and health to access to money and information, GE serves customers in more than 100 countries and employs more than 300,000 people worldwide. For more information, visit the company's Web site at http://www.ge.com. GE is Imagination at Work.