When storm restoration costs go to FERC or FEMA for reimbursement, the quality of the backup documentation determines whether that cost recovery holds up — or gets disallowed. 

For many IOUs and Co-ops, invoice support is still assembled after the fact: stitched together from spreadsheets, paper timesheets, and disconnected systems, with gaps and inconsistencies that create real financial exposure during audit.This session looks at how automating the invoicing process closes that gap. 

Attendees will come away with a practical understanding of where regulator risk typically creeps into the invoicing process — and how automation, grounded in a single continuous data set, removes it.

As utilities continue to invest in better platforms, data, and tools, the pace of technology adoption can sometimes outpace how those tools are used in real operations. 

This session, led by Jordan Blake of CenterPoint, will explore   lessons learned from integrating Storm Manager and other systems into operational response workflows, including where implementation has been more challenging than expected. 

Attendees will hear what it takes to make technology effective when it matters most: clear structure, trained and   confident teams, trusted data, and systems that support what is happening on the ground. The discussion will focus on a simple but critical measure of success: whether the tools and processes improve the response for the people   doing the work.

The CenterPoint team will give us a special behind-the-scenes visit of their Emergency Operations Center at the CenterPoint Energy Tower in downtown Houston.

This exclusive tour will provide a firsthand look at how CenterPoint Energy prepares for, manages, and responds to major incidents and severe weather events.

Guests will have the opportunity to tour their Emergency Operations Center, hear directly from members of the EP&R team, and see demonstrations of several technologies that support situational awareness, decision making, and resource coordination during emergency response operations.

Attendees will learn about the evolution of the CenterPoint response program, the challenges they've worked to overcome, and how technology, partnerships, and operational experience come together to support their mission of serving customers when they need it most.

Transportation will be coordinated by Itron team on-site.

Callout systems have been a fixture of utility storm response for over decades — yet many utilities are still relying on technology that hasn't meaningfully evolved since it was first introduced. Legacy platforms are difficult to use, require years of specialized administrator knowledge to operate, and lock customers into costly, vendor-driven configuration cycles just to keep pace with changing union agreements and business rules.

Itron Callout was built to change that. In this session, we'll explore how we're reimagining the callout experience with a modern, intuitive interface that reduces training time and   administrator risk. 

We'll discuss how self-service configuration puts control back in the hands of utilities, reducing dependency on the vendor and lowering total cost of ownership, and how continuous product investment ensures Callout keeps evolving alongside your operations rather than sitting still. 

Attendees will leave with a clear picture of what "modern" should mean for callout technology — and why the right long-term partner matters as much as the feature set itself.

We'll take a little walk over to where our Itron's own Todd Leclerc will take us through a high-level of the Itron Worker Safety solution and see how it helps keep your peers (and colleagues) safe, by digitizing field safety workflows and   protecting crews by surfacing hazards, identifying controls, and building workforce knowledge and resilience.

     

Join members of the Itron EP&R product and leadership team as they provide an update on new features as well as the product roadmap for 2027 and beyond.

We'll wrap up our first Inspire event with a recap of discussions, actions, next steps and how we continue to build this community moving forward.

No two storm forecasts are certain, and the difference between one modeled track or intensity and another can mean a completely different resourcing plan. Utilities need more than a single static prediction — they need the ability to ask "what if" and see how the answer changes.

This session explores the value of Itron's Hurricane Impact Prediction (HIP) and Winter Impact Prediction (WIP) capabilities within Storm Impact. Both models forecast customer outages, work orders, and asset damage in advance of a storm — but their real power comes from scenario flexibility. Clients can adjust projected storm tracks and intensities within the tool itself, instantly seeing how those changes shift predicted impacts to their specific customers and assets. Rather than planning against one forecast, teams can stress-test multiple plausible scenarios and build a mobilization plan that holds up across the range of ways a storm could actually develop.

Attendees will see how this scenario-based approach to hurricane and winter storm prediction turns forecasting uncertainty into an advantage — helping utilities right-size crews, optimize staging locations, and prepare stakeholders with a clearer range of possible outcomes before the storm ever makes landfall.

Join us as we kick of Inspire 2026 with a quick welcome and introductions. 

During a major storm event, crew information changes by the hour — who's activated, where they're staged, who's leading each crew, how to reach them. 

When that data lives in one system and dispatching happens in another, utilities are left re-keying information manually, working from stale crew rosters, or tracking down phone numbers in the middle of an active restoration.

This session explores how Itron Storm Manager solves that problem through direct API integration with your Outage Management System. As Storm Manager acts as the master record for every internal and external crew in an event, it pushes crew sheet IDs, crew lead and supervisor names, and contact information to the OMS in real time — so dispatchers are always working from a current, accurate roster without manual intervention. The integration works both ways: Storm Manager can also pull work package assignments and crew arrival/completion times back from the OMS, giving crews visibility into their assigned work and automatically populating accurate time-on-task data for the timesheet.

Attendees will see how connecting these two systems in real time eliminates re-keying, reduces dispatch errors, and keeps crew data consistent from activation through work completion.