Between the Poles

Geospatial analytics for the smart grid

At the Distributech 2013 conference, the largest electric power distribution conference in North America with attendance of about 9600, earler ths year in San Diego, if there was one consistent message, it was that smart grid has become mainstream - every utilty is doing something related to smart grid. 

I was interested in how gespatial was being used for smart grid applications by vendors at Distributech.  At the conference there were something on the order of 400 talks and panels.  Of these only a few explicitly mentioned geospatial or GIS so you might have concluded that geospatial was not playing a very important role in smart grid.  But the reality is quite different.  I talked directly to about 18 companies, mostly vendors, whom I asked about their use of geospatial technology.  All but two said that they were using geospatial technology in some capacity.

Geospatial analytics

One of the most interesting from the perspective of the application of geospatial technology for analytics was Tantalus Systems.  Tantalus provides utilities with an intelligent communications infrastructure supporting smart grid. Tantalus' network solutions rely on wired, wireless, or a combination for bidirectional communications.  Tantalus can integrate with well-known GISs like ArcGIS, or alternatively can provide an open source geospatial solution.

RF network analysis

Geospatial technology is used by Tantalus customers in several different capacities.  The first is to help identify problems or misalignment of resources in the radio frequency (RF) and electric grid network.  Visualizing the RF and distribution network geographically enables customers to identify and resolve problems in the RF network.   According to Dave Kauffman, Senior Product Manager for Applications and Interfaces at Tantalus, “GIS brings an entirely new dimension to problem solving for utilities. Before, our customers had to try to understand the source of problems by looking at tables and reports, but they found that with the geospatial view, the source of the problem, typically obstructions, became much easier to identify and correct."

Predictive maintenance

Tantalus customers also use geospatial analytics to look for patterns in outages by overlaying historical outage events on the distribution network and maps showing soil types, weather patterns, and traffic density patterns. Using this type of analytical approach can identify patterns that make it possible to identify equipment that is susceptible to failure and correct the problem before it actually fails.

Reducing risk in Volt/VAR

One of the new areas where GIS is just beginning to be be applied is voltage maps, a new application that Dave is very excited about. When a utility is implementing Volt/VAR at a substation to reduce load, voltages reported by smart meters can be mapped geographically in real-time across the entire distribution network in the form of isovolt maps. This makes it possible to identify areas of low voltage in real time, which is critical because the voltage cannot be allowed to drop below a tolerance mandated by the regulator in order to avoid potential damage to utility and consumer devices.

IEEE PES Smart Grid Technologies: The next challenges in grid modernization

At the IEEE PES Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies in Washington DC,  Patricia Hoffman, Asst Secretary Department of Energy, Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, gave the  keynote address. 

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

In the past the focus for the Department of Energy and for utiltiies has tended to be on individual technologies such as smart meters and AMI, self-healng networks, synchrophasars, substation automation, and so on.  Ms Hoffman's message is that we need to start focussing on the smart grid as a whole and in particular we need to focus on grid resiliency.  Things will happen, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, derechos and other natural and man-made problems.  We need to ensure that the grid is resilient so that we can recover from disasters quickly.  The example she gacve was one that I have blogged about,  Southern Co.'s use of  smart meters to track outages caused by tornadoes in April, 2011 and then help with restoration. 

Ms Hoffman then discussed specific areas where there are opportunities to make the grid more resilient.

Transmission operations

There is a lot of data that is becoming available, primarily because about 1000 synchrophasars have been deployed over the national transmission grids.  What are needed are improved interoperability, analytic, and visualization to better manage the transmission grid.  For example, it took almost a year to analyze the data and determine the cause of the 2003 Northeast blackout.  The 2011 San Diego blackout  required about 3-4 months, so fault analysis is getting better, but we need to be able to use the available data to predict the state of the transmission grid in real-time.

Distribution operations

In the area of electricity distribution, Ms Hoffman singled out peak load reduction as the area where there are the greatest econimic and environmental benefits.  Reducing peak load means that the construction of new power plants (peakers) that may only be used a hundred hours a year can be avoided.  The other areas she identified include distribution automation, especially automated self-healing networks using devices such as intelliRupters,  improved outage management, using predictive analytics to replace equipment before it fails, and microgrids.

Customer empowerment

Areas that directly impact the customer are residential diagnostics to help the customer understand how power is being used in the home and ways that it can be used more effectively, at lower cost, and as much as possible moved to off-peak.  Photovoltaic cells and plug-in electric vehicles are becoming much more prevalent and utlities need to be prepared for these.  Improving reliability and resiliency directly impacts customers by reducing the number and duration of outages.  An area that is getting a lot attention is rate structures, for example, pricing electric power to motivate shifting load from peak to off peak.  A new technology that is being investigated by DoE is transactive control signals.  This is a  smart grid signaling approach that communicates prices and other information, such as expected future prices, to encourage the customer to change his/her electric power usage.

Energy infrastructure cyber protection

Ms Hoffman's message on cyber protection is that it needs to be dynamic and multi-dimensional.  Infrastructure is complex and changing and new vulnerabilities are detected every day.  In addition multiple organizations are responsible for the grid.  Effective cyber security management has to deal with a dynamic landscape of control and information systems.  There are a broad range of threats and motivations including unintentional, natural phenomena, and those with malicious intent including theft, revenge, and national security.  It is also important to recognize the interdependencies among critical infrastructure.  A gas explosion can affect the telecommunications and electric power networks.  Loss of electric power can affect many other networks including water and telecommunications.  Disruption of communications, for example, severing a fiber optic cable can directly affect the electric power grid.

To address these challenges cybersecurity solutions need to be mutli-dimensional.including cyber-physical, wide area monitoring and protection, cryptography, anti-tamper devices and advanced architectures. 

One of the most serious challenges that Ms Hoffman singled out specifically is developing the cybersecurity workforce that is going to be responsible for implementing these measures.

Where are we headed ?

The next major challenge is turning the smart grid into a driver of economic development.  The example Ms. Hoffman used was Chatanooga.  The Electric Power Board (EPB) saw the smart grid as not only benefiting the utility and improving the quality of life of its cusomers, but also as a driver of economic development.  The city’s decision to deploy one of the country’s highest capacity fiber-optic networks not only improved power quality, reliability, customer service and energy efficiency but also made Chananooga more attractive to business.  For instance, because bandwidth is virtually unlimited, EPB is able to offer its customers Internet upload and download speeds of up to one gigabit/sec, making Chattanooga very attractive for businesses that rely on the internet for critical aspects of their operations.

NRECA TechAdvantage: Modeling is the key to grid resilience

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) is comprised of more than 900 electric coops in the U.S.  This is more than just an organization representing electric coops at the national level.  It also supports a very active technology research arm called the Cooperative Research Network (CRN) that supports collaborative research with the Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, National Labs and others.

At the NRECA TechAdvantage conderence in New Orleans today, Dr Craig Miller, Project Manager at CRN gave a scintillating and inspiring presentation on the future of the U.S. power grid over the next two decades.

Four years ago when DoE received a large amount of ARRA funding, the focus was on the smart grid and the technology required to support it.  Now every utility has done something using smart grid technology.  The new focus is on resiliency, how to make the grid agile.  This is a lot more complicated today with our full quiver of smart devices. 

The foundation of the smart grid are sensors.  All electrical devices these days are smart and are able to report their status ranging from several times a microsecond to every 15 minutes.  The result is that utilities are faced with 100'000 times as much data as they've dealt with in the past.  The challenge is the analytics to make sense of all this data.

In the old days, when you had a fault, you dispatched a crew and a few hours or days later, the fault was fixed and people got power again.  Now the network can be reconfigured in subseconds.  But there are a lot more things to worry about.  When you reconfigure the network, you have to worry about whether the new configuration can support the load.  If it can't there a number of options you have that weren't available with the old grid.  You may be able to tap battery storage, autpmatically startup backup generators at industrial customers and take them off the grid, disconnect less critical customers, automatically shut down some devices for customers on demand response programs, reduce voltage, or even isolate some parts of the grid, so-called microgrids.  With the new grid, there are tools to manage load, generation, and storage dynamically, and since the grid is a balancing act, all of this has to happen at subsecond speeds.

Modeiing the power grid is the key to the engineering challenge of the 21st Century

Dr Miller's most important point is that the key to all of this is models of the power grid.  Being able to model the  network and predict what it will do faster than the network itself is seen as the key to the next generation "agile" grid, which Dr Miller predicts will be the greatest engineering achievement of the 21st C, much as the old grid was called the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th C.  Dr Miller pulled no punches when he said that our current models of the grid are all bad.  They are only able to be used for planning purposes, not for operations. 

Modeling the grid is a very complex problem.  Even our existing "simple" models are incredibly complex.  This problem will require the best of our current super computers, and will probably require another decade for this level of computing power to become affordable for utilities.  For example, a project that CRN is working on with DoE to improve modeling of the electric grid will use Titan, at 21 petaflops, the fastest super computer in the world today.  This is indeed a "challenge to light up our lives", especially the lives of the next generation of electric power engineers.

Geodesign Summit: Changing how we manage our built environment

David Bartlett, who leads IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, believes there is an " immediate requirement to significantly and urgently change the way our built environment is managed."  And he is very sanquine about the capacity of our evolving technology to do this.  The Internet of Things is approaching a trillion objects.   Moore's law conrtinues to operate so we have incredible processing power.  The cloud is enablng us to make this processing power available to just about anybody with any type of device any where. Big data technology is enablng analytics in real-time.  We are rapidly approaching havng enough computing capacity to capture digitally, visualize and model our entire built environment.  IBM's Smarter Planet initiative is aimed at helping to make this happen.  According to David 42% of the world's energy goes to buildings so improving the efficiency of buildings is a primary focus of the Smarter Planet intiiative.

In October 2009 President Obama signed a directive calling for a more sustainable operations  strategy across the federal government. Commercial buildings use roughly 40 percent of the energy in the United States and the federal government owns approximately 182 million square feet of office space nationwide.  The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has a goal of reducing energy usage across federal buildings at least 30 % by 2015.                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
The GSA has contracted IBM to create a cloud-based centralized system that will monitor building performance and feed information into a central building management dashboard. It is expected that better analytics will help the government automate building controls to help property managers take more active control over building performance.

The initial focus during the first year of the smart building initiative will be 50 buildings (including the White House) that have already been identified as energy inefficient. It is estimated that the project could save approximately $15 million in operational costs annually.

Where do we start ?

A frequent question that David often gets after an organization buys into the smarter planet vision is where do we start.  IBM has developed a capability maturity model that offers a roadmap for organizations to use to assess their current situation to determine at what stage they are and then provides guidance to what they should prioritize to get to the next stage.

Motivating change

One of the most important tools in motivating change is transparency.  The internet faciliates transparency.  President Obama's administration has made government transparency using the internet a top priority.  David has found that transparency and gamification is extremely powerful in motivating change and in overcoming institutionalized inefficiencies ("but we have always done it this way").

Crowdsourcing green at the Los Angeles Unified School District

IBM has found that educational institutions and defense departments are the most receptive to the Smarter Planet vision. 

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is an interesting example.  LAUSD, which is the second largest school district in the country, decided it wanted to be the nation's greenest school district..  LAUSD has 700,000 students and more than 14,000 buildings spread out over 710 square miles.  But they had no budget for doing the green initative.  What they did have was an IBM asset management system and a lot of students with mobile phones.

Students, teachers and staff became part of the solution.  A mobile app developed by an IBM partenr was installed on students and others' mobile phones that made them all green monitors and reporters identifying maintenance issues such as leaky faucets and broken air conditioning units by sending text messages and photos through their mobile phones. The mobile app sends the photos and texts for analysis to the server where a GIS shows staff where the problem is located and records the problem in the asset management system.  Gamification was used to encourage compeitition, for example, for who is the best green reporter.  Within the first eight months of implementing the program LAUSD responded to more than 750 maintenance requests. Things are getting fixed and students and others feel like active participants in the program to make the schools greener. 

IBM plans to announce the next three school districts to participate in the Smarter Planet program.

Why are utilities implementing analytics programs and how are they doing it ?

At  the Data Analytics for Utilities conference in Toronto yesterday, several speakers explained what is driving utilities to invest in analytics programs, and gave some real world examples of how utilities are implementing analytics programs.

Why analytics ?

In a nutshell, as a number of speakers emphasized, the goal is to enable utilities to make decisions based on information derived from the increasing volume of reliable data that is available to utilities as a result of their smart grid activities, rather than "gut" intuition, which is what utilities had to rely on in the past because they had limited and out-of-date data.

Lloyd Tokerud of Hudson Energy referenced a seminal paper, an MIT Sloan Management Review "Big Data, Analytics, and the Path from Insight to Value" that found that top performing organizations are twice as likely to apply analytics to activities. 

The study also found that the biggest challenges in adopting analytics are managerial and cultural.  Lloyd pointed out that to enable an analytics prorgam to be successful, it is necessary to educate people on the use of data and to promote a data-driven culture rather than intuition.  The important benefit is that an anlytics program can enable the utility to make better decisions faster.

Lloyd also said that analytics requires people with different skills than traditional IT.   He called them  "purple people".  Purple people understand both IT (red) and the business (blue).

Guidelines for implementing an analytics program

Mary Rich, who was responsible for smart grid and analytics initiatives at Centerpoint Energy in Texas gave a very insightful overview of how Centerpoint implemented their first anaytics program subsequent to their rollout of smart meters and AMI.

Based on her experience at Centrepoint she made several points that are important for any utility planning to embark on an analytics program, 

First of all, implementing an analytics initiaive is not a departmental exercise, it has to be company-wide.  It needs top-level support and strong governance.  Without these it will either fail or drag on for years.  Seondly it is not cheap.  It requires new tools and new people.  The big payback will not be short term, but long term.  Creating a data-driven culture is a cultural transformation that requires breaking down traditional data silos in engineering, operations, GIS, and across the company. 

One of the most important objectives is ensuring that the data is accurate and comprehensive.  Most importantly there can be only one authoritative source for each piece of data.  Conflicting reports are not going to help management make decisions rapidly and even worse they will raise red flags with the regulator.

How did Centerpoint Energy implement an analytics program

At Centerpoint they created a team comprised of subject matter experts (SMEs) from all divisions of the company.  It was ensured that these people were relieved of some of their normal committments so they could devote quality time to the analytics initiative.

The team spent about a month and a half identifying areas which potentially could benefit significantly from the application of analytics.  They then winnowed these down to the top 25.

For each of these opportunities they wrote detailed use cases,  Mary emphasized that this was not easy.  It was time-consuming and often required external support people to help SMEs who were not familiar with writing use cases.

As a practical example of implementing a use case, ons of the uses cases related to what Centerpoint refers to as "diversion" and what others call non-revenue-generating, non-technical losses.  With analog meters Centerpoint had to rely on the meter readers to note signs of tamperring with a meter and to report a possible diversion problem to Centerpoint.  A crew would roll a truck and investigate,but in many cases it would turn out not to be a diversion probem.  Wth smart meters meter tampering can be detected auomatically., but it is an involved process because it is necessary to make sure that there isn't an outage or a crew working in the area, because these can trigger events that look like meter tampering.  The SME team working on the use case estimated that by using autmated techniques they could increase detection by 20%.

The reality was quite different. They found that their autmated algorithms were much more effective than expected, because they were able to identify real diversion events with 80% accuracy.  They found that the big business benefit was fewer truck rolls.  Mary strongly recommended that every utility should know the cost of a truck roll because reducing truck rolls is one of the most important areas where utiltiies can reduce costs, often dramatically.  Mary said that in Houston alone, they were able to eliminate 4.5 million truck rolls.

Big data and trends in data analytics for utilities

I had the opportunity to catch up on current trends in analytics in the utility indusrty at  the Data Analytics for Utilities conference in Toronto today.

Jane Allen and Tom Peters from Deloitte gave a high level overview of what utilities are experiencing as they move toward the smart grid and decarbonizing energy generation through intermittent renewable energy sources.  

Big data

The smart grid means intelligent devices that can report their status sometimes as frequently as many times per second.  Smart meters, which are many utilties' first experience with intelligent devices, typically capture electricity usage in 15 minute intervals, which for a utility wih a million meters translates into 3.2 terabytes of data. They may be required by law or by the regulator to maintain historical usage data on-line for a significant period of time.  The result is that the data volumes that utilities need to manage are going up exponentially.  For example, Oncor, the largest distribution and transmission utility in Texas said that their operational database which used to be 30 terabytes is now 300 terabytes.

Analytics

To make sense of the huge volumes of data that utilities are collecting requires specialized analytical tools that are able to handle large data volumes.  The first wave of analytical tools were not designed to do this in real time or even near real-time, but the next wave will be able to.

Apparently Germany was the first country to use analytics to help sculpt electric power demand to the supply of intermittent energy from wind and solar.  This is critical in Germnay because renewables contribute a greater proportion of the electric power in Germany than any other major country.

Deloitte sees five main areas where analytics are being applied in the utility industry, customer, supply chain, financial, workforce and risk. 

Tom Peters oulined some of the trending application areas where analytics are being used by utilities. 

Pricing analytics

Segmenting demand using demographcs and looking at dynamic pricing to manage peak demand (demand response) in different sectors.

Marketing anlaytics

Monitoring the response to web-based marketing campaigns in real time.

Customer service analytics

Analyzing unstructured text data in social media looking for "bags of words" that identify topics in on-line discussions to monitor and assess how the on-line community is responding to utility programs and initiaitves.

Workplace injury analytics

Using analytics to identify high-cost work-related injuries that are preventable.

Fraud analytics

For example, analyzing a company's general ledger for an entire year looking for duplicate invoices, invoices sent to the wrong company, billings for products and services never delivered, and so on.  Tom Peters said that in the case of one large company this saved $11 million in a year.

Geospatial analytics

Using location information to look at big data in a different way from a traditional spreadsheet makes it possible to see things from a much more interesting and enlightening perspective.

In summary utilities are having to deal with a lot more data.  They need analytics to winnow the wheat from the chaff, to turn huge volumes of data into actionable information.  The good news is that the software analytical tools available now that are designed specifically for big data are getting better and more affordable.