Planmetrix Advisory helps electric utilities investigate complex issues, compare investment alternatives, and understand financial tradeoffs. We combine industry research, economic analysis, and decision modeling to support infrastructure planning, reliability, and resilience.
From Research to Practical Decisions
A specialist consultancy with 25+ years of experience across utility research, financial analysis, and technology delivery. We develop models and software and lead projects that put findings into practice.
What We Do
Engage us to answer a research question, evaluate an investment, or develop an analytical tool. Our primary focus is electric utilities, with additional experience in commercial credit software, financial analysis, and learning platforms for financial services organizations.
Establish the evidence needed for planning and investment decisions. We investigate distribution reliability and resilience, undergrounding, storm hardening, asset management, and emerging technologies. Literature reviews, utility practice comparisons, and statistical analyses clarify the available approaches, their limitations, and their practical implications.
Explore Research →Translate research and data into clear comparisons of costs, risks, and investment priorities. We develop configurable decision models, lifecycle cost analyses, and scenario comparisons for reliability and resilience planning. Our work includes circuit-level investment ranking, FERC capital and O&M analysis, and the financial implications of major storms.
Explore Investment Studies →Turn analytical methods and business requirements into applications clients can use. Our experience includes decision support tools, survey and analytics platforms, utility knowledge management systems, research portals, and learning applications. We connect requirements, application design, and development with the workflows the software needs to support.
Discuss a Software Project →Move research and technology initiatives from definition through delivery. We lead requirements development, feasibility studies, vendor evaluation, pilot programs, and software implementation. Experience includes utility aerial inspection pilots and learning management systems, with attention to scope, priorities, coordination, and deployment.
Discuss a Project →Representative Work
Selected examples show how we connect utility research with economic analysis and decision support. Download the summaries for methods, findings, assumptions, and limitations.
Developed a configurable Excel decision support tool to compare reliability and resilience improvements across circuits and circuit segments. The model combines risk factors, customer impact, and remediation costs into relative investment rankings, with user-defined weights and budget screening to support planning and engineering review.
Executive summary (PDF) →Analyzed five years of FERC Form 1 data from 99 utilities to compare overhead and underground distribution O&M expense. A lifecycle cost framework examines when lower ongoing maintenance costs may offset higher underground construction costs, providing a screening basis for location-specific investment analysis.
Executive summary (PDF) →Examined financial, reliability, and weather records for four Florida investor-owned utilities over 2000–2020. The study investigated the relationship between storm-related outage duration and restoration expense, identifying useful data sources and the limitations of using historical costs to support resilience investment cases.
Executive summary (PDF) →Prepared guidance for EPRI’s Climate READi initiative on assessing climate risk, screening adaptation options, and prioritizing resilience investment. The framework brings together benefit-cost analysis and multi-criteria evaluation, including customer impacts and benefits that are difficult to monetize.
Policy summary (PDF) →Research & Publications
Explore research on resilience valuation, storm costs, utility efficiency, and asset management. These summaries complement the investment studies above and explain the analytical approaches behind informed planning decisions.
Financial Modeling · Resilience
A comparative review of resilience tools and utility planning frameworks prepared to inform EPRI’s Climate READi initiative. Examines how hazard assessment, asset vulnerability, outage consequences, and investment prioritization fit together, and where existing tools offer useful components or leave gaps.
Download summary (PDF) →Financial Modeling
Reviews approaches to estimating utility restoration costs, customer interruption losses, and wider economic impacts. Explains the role of outage valuation, predictive damage models, and benefit-cost analysis in evaluating hardening investments, including why outage duration and customer type matter.
Download summary (PDF) →Financial Modeling · Regulation
Synthesizes more than 30 jurisdictions and case studies on utility efficiency and asset utilization. Evaluates the strengths and limitations of load factor, alternative planning metrics, and peer benchmarking methods, with attention to weather, service territory differences, and regulatory incentives.
Download summary (PDF) →Distribution Research · Asset Management
An eleven-stage framework for assessing and developing condition-based maintenance programs. Covers asset selection, monitoring, alarm thresholds, staffing, systems integration, work management, and performance review, supported by industry context on diagnostics and the transition toward predictive maintenance.
Download summary (PDF) →Tell us what you need to investigate, compare, or develop. We can help define a research study, build a financial or decision model, develop a custom application, or lead an implementation project. We typically respond within one business day.
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