A comprehensive solution accelerator for power utilities to monitor and optimize electrical grids using Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) data with Microsoft Fabric's real-time intelligence capabilities.
- Overview
- Key Features
- Solution Architecture
- Prerequisites
- Installation Instructions
- Usage Instructions
- Solution Components
- License
This solution accelerator demonstrates how power utilities can leverage Microsoft Fabric to build a real-time grid intelligence platform. It processes streaming telemetry from smart meters (AMI), vehicle tracking, and weather data to provide actionable insights for grid operations, outage management, and infrastructure optimization.
The solution simulates a realistic utility grid environment with:
- Smart meter telemetry from thousands of meters reporting power consumption, voltage, current, and power quality metrics
- Vehicle tracking for field service crews and mobile assets
- Weather data integration to correlate environmental conditions with grid performance
- Real-time intelligence using KQL (Kusto Query Language) for immediate operational visibility
- Advanced visualizations through Power BI reports and real-time dashboards
- Proactive Outage Management: Detect and respond to outages in real-time with correlated meter and weather data
- Grid Optimization: Identify power quality issues, load imbalances, and infrastructure stress points
- Operational Efficiency: Track field service vehicles and optimize crew dispatch
- Predictive Maintenance: Detect meter failures, battery issues, and tamper events before they escalate
- 🚀 One-Click Deployment: Automated installation notebook deploys all Fabric items with dependency management
- 📊 Real-Time Streaming: Azure Event Hubs ingestion with Eventstreams for AMI, vehicle, and weather data
- 🔍 Advanced Analytics: KQL queries for time-series analysis, anomaly detection, and correlation
- 📈 Interactive Dashboards: Pre-built Power BI reports and KQL dashboards for operational monitoring
- 🎭 Realistic Simulation: Comprehensive data simulators with seasonal patterns, outages, and failure scenarios
- 🏗️ Scalable Architecture: Built on Microsoft Fabric's lakehouse and eventhouse architecture
- 🤖 AI-Ready: Includes Fabric Data Agent integration for natural language queries and incorporates Smart Narratives to facilitate interpretation of Power BI reports
Note that this diagram represents a hypothetical real-world solution. This solution accelerator replaces source systems with Spark notebooks that generate synthetic data.
- AMI Simulators: Generate realistic smart meter telemetry with seasonal/daily patterns, failures, and outage scenarios
- Vehicle Simulator: Simulate routes for field service vehicles with speed and heading data
- Storm Simulator: Create weather events that trigger correlated grid outages
- Eventstreams: Fabric-native streaming connectors with built-in Event Hub endpoints.
- Eventhouse (KQL Database): Hot path for real-time queries with minimal latency
- Lakehouse (Delta Tables): Storage for reference data with seamles integration with the eventhouse
- KQL Queries: Time-series analysis, aggregations, and correlation queries
- Power BI Semantic Models: DirectQuery mode connection to the eventhouse for real-time reporting
- Data Agent: AI-powered natural language interface to query grid data
- Maps: Real-time visualization of streaming and reference data.
- Real-Time Dashboards: Real-time visibility for key operational metrics.
- Power BI Reports: Time-series analysis, aggregations, and self-service analytics.
- Activator: Event data is continuously analyzed and automated notification or actions are initiated when triger conditions are satisfied.
- Microsoft Fabric Capacity: F16 or higher recommended (Power BI Premium capacity is also supported). Note: this solution includes AI features that are not available on a Fabric Trial capacity. While you will be albe to deploy the solution, to a workspace on a Trial capacity, some portions of this solution will not work properly.
- Automatic Page Refresh enabled: Fabric and Power BI capacities must be configured to allow frequent automatic page refresh. Certain reports included in this solution are configured to refresh pages every 2 seconds to visualize streaming data. Ensure that your capacity settings allow page refresh with this frequency.
- Fabric Workspace: A workspace with contributor or admin permissions
- Power BI License: Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium Per User license.
- Basic understanding of Microsoft Fabric concepts (lakehouses, eventhouses, eventstreams)
- Familiarity with KQL (Kusto Query Language) for data exploration (optional)
- Power BI experience for customizing reports (optional)
- Log in to Microsoft Fabric
- Click Workspaces → + New workspace
- Name your workspace (e.g., "Grid Intelligence")
- Assign a Fabric capacity or trial capacity
- Click Apply
- Download the Solution Installer notebook to a local folder on your computer.
- In your Fabric workspace, click + New → Import notebook
- On your local computer, navigate to the folder where you saved the Solution Installer.ipynb notebook.
- Upload and open the Solution Installer notebook
- Click Run all to execute the deployment
The installer will:
- ✅ Install required Python packages
- ✅ Download solution files from GitHub
- ✅ Deploy all Fabric items (Eventhouses, Lakehouses, Eventstreams, Notebooks, Reports)
- ✅ Configure item dependencies and relationships
- ✅ Import sample data files
- ✅ Configure credentials and refresh all semantic models
- Navigate to the Simulation folder in your workspace
- Open the AMI Reference Data Simulation notebook
- Click Run all
This generates:
- Meter metadata
- Network topology (substations, feeder lines, transformers)
Location: Simulation/AMI Telemetry and Outage Simulation
Duration: 2 hours (configurable)
Data Generated: ~120 batches of telemetry + outage events
- Open the AMI Telemetry and Outage Simulation notebook
- Click Run all
- Monitor progress in the output (status printed every minute)
Data Generated:
- Power consumption (kW, voltage (V), current (A), etc.)
- Power quality metrics (power factor, THD, etc.)
- Meter health indicators (battery, tamper detection)
- Outage events (last gasp, restoration)
Location: Simulation/Vehicle Telemetry Simulator
Duration: Continuous route playback
Data Generated: GPS coordinates and operational vehicle telemetry every 10 seconds
- Open the Vehicle Telemetry Simulator notebook
- Click Run all
- Vehicles will follow predefined routes with realistic GPS tracking
Location: Simulation/Storm Simulation
Duration: approximately 2 minutes (triggers outages)
Data Generated: geospatial data representing the progression of a severe thunderstorm through the service area.
- Open the Storm Simulation notebook
- Click Run all
- Observe progression of the storm by opening the Meter Analytics report and navigating to the Meter Outages + Weather page. Note that storm progression is accelerated -- it will take ~2 minutes for the storm to pass through the service area.
- Storm events will trigger correlated meter outages in the AMI simulation (when AMI Telemetry and Outage Simulation notebook is running)
Service Area Map
- Visualize the health of meters across the service area
- Visualize weather data
- Visualize locations of service vehicles
- Diplay location of electrical transmission lines
Access: Navigate to Visualize and Chat → Service Area Map
Meter Statuses Dashboard
- Real-time meter health monitoring
- Outage maps and timelines
- Power quality monitoring
Access: Navigate to Visualize and Chat → Meter Statuses
Vehicle Tracking Dashboard
- Live vehicle locations on map
- Route history and playback
- Speed and vehicle telemetry metrics
Access: Navigate to Visualize and Chat → Vehicle Tracking
Meter Exploration Report
- Customer consumption patterns
- Recent trends in power consumption and quality metrics
Meter Telemetry - Time Series Analysis
- Multi-meter comparison views
- Flexible time series analysis of metrics from individual meters
- Anomaly detection
- Descriptive statistics and correlation analysis between selected tags
Vehicle Telemetry - Time Series Analysis
- Fleet performance metrics
- Vehicle health and performance monitoring
The Meter_Data_Agent enables natural language queries:
Example queries:
- "Show me all meters with outages in the last hour"
- "What transformer has the highest number of meters impacted by an ougage?"
- "Which vehicle is closest to transformer XYZ?"
- "What's the average power consumption by feeder line and service class?"
- "Which meters have low battery warnings?"
Access: Navigate to Visualize and Chat → Meter_Data_Agent
The Meter Activator enables automatic alerts when trigger conditions are met.
By default, the Activator is configured to generate alerts when the level of total harmonic distortions exceeds a specified threshold and stays at that level for an extended period of time. You may configure other triggers using the no-code authoring interface.
Access: Navigate to Act → Meter Activator
If you encounter challenges with the solution, consider the following steps:
- Ensure that all pre-requisites have been fully satisfied
- Ensure that all installation steps have been completed in order
- Ensure that simulation notebooks are actively running -- it may take a few minutes to simulated data generators to start producing simulated events.
- Ensure that simulation notebooks are actively running -- by default, meter and vehicle simulations will time out and terminate after 2 hours. Storm simulation will terminate after 2 minutes.
- Microsoft Fabric Documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/fabric/
- Community Forums: Fabric Community
- GitHub Issues: Report bugs or request features in this repository
Contributions are welcome! Please follow these guidelines:
- Fork the repository
- Create a feature branch (
git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature) - Commit your changes (
git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature') - Push to the branch (
git push origin feature/AmazingFeature) - Open a Pull Request
- Additional simulation scenarios (e.g., solar generation, EV charging)
- New dashboard templates
- Performance optimizations
- Documentation improvements
- Sample KQL queries
This project is provided as-is for demonstration and educational purposes.
Built with Microsoft Fabric's powerful real-time intelligence platform:
- Eventstreams: For seamless data ingestion
- Eventhouse: For lightning-fast KQL queries
- Lakehouse: For unified data storage
- Power BI: For dynamic visualizations
- Maps: For stunning real-time geospatial visualizations
- Activator: For intelligent alerting