Between the Poles

Mobile geospatial solution improves data quality at water utility

At the HxGN conference in Las Vegas Chris Bodely of Anglian Water which provides water and wastewater services to 6.3 million customers in the southeast of England gave an overview of GIS at the water utilty and in particular their implementation of a mobile GIS. This is relevant for any utility that is still sending paper maps and work orders to the field.

Background

In 1992 Anglian began digitizing their paper maps and drawings.  In 1995 they implemented an AM/FM/GIS solution using Intergraph FRAMME.  Then in 2003/2004 they developed a new GIS strategy, a key element of which was a mobile GIS solution.  At that time field work orders were paper and the process to develop them was manual.  Because it was a  manual, paper-based process, it was difficult to process feedback from the field staff when something was changed or when errors in the records were documented by field staff.  The result was that forms returned from the field were often incomplete and unreliable.  This is a problem that most utilities relying on a paper-based process are experiencing.

Mobile GIS

In 2006 Anglian provided Panasonic Toughbooks to their field staff with a desktop mapping application and facilities data.  The application enables field staff to see as-built maps and other information for Anglian's water and wastewater networks.  In 2012 the application was replaced with an integrated application that includes accces to SAP. 

A key feature of the mobile GIS is that it also enables field staff to record errors and changes as redline directly on the digital map in the field as part of a two step automated process.  The redline is which is then forwarded electroniaclly to Anglian's Central Mapping group.  After reviewing the proposed changes Central Mapping update the faciltiies database with the new information.  Providing direct access to the database has empowered the field staff, who are now taking greater responsibility for the reliability of the data in the facilities database. 

Benefits

Anglian found that the mobile GIS resulted in producitivity improvments across most process areas of 2-5%.  But the biggest benefit was in the area of data quality.   Form completion and quality improved from the low 60s% to the high 90s% over a period of 6 months. This resulted in improved regulatory and statutory data capture, for example, to comply with the Traffic Management Act (TMA), and directly impacts the bottom line, because it means fewer fines for non-compliance with the TMA.  Another major benefit was that empowerment resulted in a happier field workforce

The remaining major challenge is to provide the updated facilities information to field staff automatically.  Currently it is a manual process requring ditribution of the updated facilities database via DVD.

Distributech 2013: Smart grid becomes mainstream

If there was one consistent message at Distributech this year, it was that smart grid has become mainstream - every utilty is doing something related to smart grid.

A very good example of some the things that utilities are abe to do because of their investment in smart grid technology is the keynote given by Michael Niggli, COO and President of San Diego Gas and Electric Company (SDGE).  SDG&E is a regulated public utility with 3.4 million customers and 1.4 million electric meters and more than 840,000 natural gas meters in San Diego and southern Orange counties.

Smart grid

According to Mr. Niggli smart grid is accelerating like never before.  SDG&E has deployed 2.3 million smart meters to electric and gas consumers. And there are other smart-grid related initiatives that SDG&E has undertaken including distributed generation, primarily solar photvoltaic (PV), plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), and a new outage management system that leverages real-time data from smart meters..

Social networking and customer engagement

Having smart meters has helped in a way that SDG&E probably didn't originally project.  When SDG&E had to take the San Onofre nuclear plant, which represents 20% of their generation capacity, off-line in January 2012, they had to look for ways to dramatically reduce load.  SDG&E leveraged their smart meter network to help reduce power demand.  I have blogged before about utilities using social networking to communicate with the public.  In this case one of the ways that SDG&E took advantage of their AMI network was to use social networking to help reduce load.  The smart meter network (AMI) allowed them to  compare different schools' power usage so they used social gaming to create a competition among schools to see who could reduce their energy usage the most.

Green button

Another area where SDGE and a number of other utilities are helping consumers become more energy consciousus is the Green Button program, originally modeled on Veteran Affairs' Blue Button program.  SDGE's Green Button program not only allows users to access their own usage data, but also to make it available to 3rd parties, typically companies who analyze consumers' historical usage to help them reduce their power usage.  Across the country about 16 million consumers have access to their electric usage data via a Green Button program and another 30 mllion are exptected to get access soon.

Distributed generation

California is leading the country in clean energy.  California has mandated 33% renewable energy by 2020, and has also mandated reducing emissions to 1990 levels, by about 30% from current levels, in the same timeframe.  In addition new federal regulations targeting 54.5 miles per gallon in all new vehicles by 2025 is dramatically changing the energy landscape in California.  And as Mr. Niggli and other speakers emphasized, what is happening to utilities in Califiornia will happen to utilities in the rest of the country.

Distributed generation is an important source of renewable energy for SDGE.  According to Mr. Niggli In SDG&E's service territory there are 21'000 rooftop PV installations with a capacity of 160 MW.  New rooftop PV installations  are increasing at a rate of 3% per month.

Plug-in electric vehicles

Presently there are 2'500 plug-in electric vehicles in San Diego currently and SDGE is projecting that this could rise to 200'000 by 2020.  SDGE has used time of use pricing to motivate PEV owners to charge at super off peak when electricity is at a very low rate.  As a result 84% of vehicle charging is occuring between 12 midnight and 5am.

Wind and solar intermittent energy sources changes the daily demand profile

When intermiitent sources like wind and solar generation contribute more than about 20%, they begin to significantly impact the daily generation profile.  On the demand side, plug-in electric vehicles and increasing customer awareness of electric usage are changing daily load profiles.  The difference between the two is critically important to SDGE because they need to provide generation capacity to fill the gap.   Mr. Niggli gave two examples from the Californi ISO where generation dropped by 4'500 MW in 2 hrs, and then ramped up by 12'500 MW in 2.5 hrs, as a result of wind and solar generation.

SDG&E expects to start seeing the impact of the new daily power profile in 2015 and is working now to find dispatchable energy sources that can ramp up and down rapidly.  To put this in context, it takes months to ramp up nuclear, weeks for coal-fired plants, minutes for hyroelectric and natural-gas turbines, and microseconds for batteries.

Wild fires

Wild fires are a big problem for SDG&E because that makes SDGE liable for damage caused by fires started by SDGE equipment, for example, by poles being blown over. 

SDGE has implemented 144 weather stations to monitor local weather conditions in their service territory.  If winds get too high in an area increasign the risk of dmage to poles and other equipment, SDG&E will proactively shut down part of the network.  They have also put cameras on transmission lines and nstalled software that can automatically detect fires on transmission lines.

Outage management leveraging smart meters

SDG&E has installed a new outage management system that leverages their 2.3 million smart meters.  The major advantage that the new system provides is that they can detect an outage before the first customer calls in.  They can also differentiate without rolling a truck between outages due to customer problems and those caused by their own network.  The net effect is that it reduces the number of outages that SDG&E needs to respond to and reduces the average outage time (CAIDI and SAIDI).

GITA PNW: Reflections on GITA's role in rapid technology change in the utility industry

In 1982 a not-for-profit organization AM/FM International was chartered to provide the growing AM/FM industry with an educational forum to exchange ideas and keep up with changing technologies including the change from paper to digital mapping, called Automated Mapping/Facilities Management at the time.  In 1998, AM/FM International changed its name to the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA). Since then GITA's mission has been to provide education and information exchange on the use and benefits of geospatial information and technology for the world's infrastructure, particularly in utility organizations including electric power, water and waste water and gas. 

In this time of rapid technology change in the utility industry, driven again by the renewed penetration of digital technologies into all aspects of utility operations, the need for an organization like GITA to monitor new technologies and provide education and an open forum for the exchange of ideas is greater than ever. 

But with current limited travel budgets at many utilities, regional conferences are attracting more participants than national events.  GITA has about 15 chapters in North America, and one of the most active is the Pacific Northwest Chapter (GITA PNW), which just held its annual conference.  I have been attending this event for at least five years.  This year's event was again very worthwhile and included a number of presentations on new IT technologies and their application to the utility sector, several of which I have blogged about.

Green construction and the convergence of model-based design and geospatial

Modern web portals for utilities - asynchronously updatable mashups and standards-based

A cloud-based hosted solution for small utilities

Reflections on GITA's role in technology change in the utility industry by the President of GITA PNW

The event was opened by the President of GITA PNW, Zan Strausz.  He reflected on the origins of GITA and why he thinks that the needs that drove the formation of AM/FM International and GITA are just as important today as they were in the 1980's and 1990's.  I found his talk every perceptive and relevant to anyone contemplating the massive technology changes that the utility industry is just beginning to embark on, and I have included some of his remarks here.

Before we launch into our program I want to take this opportunity to reflect on the venerable tradition you as conference attendees are a part of. I'm speaking of the long history of GITA providing a forum for education, promotion and innovation in the geospatial world. Its roots in the utility industry reflect the early adoption of geospatial technology going back 50 years. With the development of what was then known as Automated Mapping/Facilities Management, or AM/FM, utilities were pioneers in applying geospatial concepts to analysis and asset management, way before the term Geographic Information System became the ubiquitous concept it is today. It was around this technology that GITA, originally called AM/FM International, was organized. Over the years the focus of the organization has expanded beyond just the utility industry to include a more broad base of infrastructure users and service providers involved in the application of geospatial technology. But the core purpose of the organization remains to provide a forum for the dissemination and sharing of geospatial technology concepts as they relate to increasing the efficiency and value of the services our  organizations provide.  

I would like to provide one example of an issue that I have observed in my own industry which I believe can be mitigated by benefits of the forum provided by GITA. I refer to what I would term "technology inertia" by which I mean the cumulative effect of bureaucratic momentum and ingrained habits that prevent the adoption of new and particularly emerging technology. This is not necessarily a  bad thing; a responsible organization needs to wisely and considerately adapt to new technology, as  steward of their investors' or customers' interests. However, it becomes a problem when it delays the  application of technology that can definitely improve the efficiency of the organization. It is ironic that  this problem would appear in the utility industry, which has a history of innovation in the application of geospatial technology ... I'm certainly sympathetic with the conservative ethos of not changing with every shift in the winds of technology, and if something works, why change? But, often, this can retard innovation which would benefit  everyone.

Forums such as GITA provides can be an antidote to this ossified conservatism by giving us insights into emerging and successfully applied geospatial technology, provided by our peers and  industry experts; insights that we need to advance our enterprises into the future.  That future holds some immediate challenges to the utility industry in particular. The many  technologies embodied in the concept of the Smart Grid are going to need to be implemented in the  very near future if we are to meet the huge challenges of providing power, water and other basic  infrastructure in a world whose exploding demand is rapidly running up against the realities and  imperatives imposed by the finite nature of the resources of our increasingly small world. Geospatial  technology will certainly play a key role in the management of the huge amounts of data processing  and analysis that will need to be applied to provide any hope that we can we can solve the  infrastructure challenges that absolutely must be met before we can leave future generations the legacy  of a clean, prosperous and healthy world.

GITA PNW: A cloud-based hosted solution for small utilities

At the 12th annual Geospatial Information and Technology (GITA) Pacific Northwest Conference at Salishan on the Oregon Coast, John Mitchell of Terraspatial Technologies gave a fascinating presentation on a hosted or SaaS (software as a service) solution for small utilities.

I blogged previously about Burlington Hydro, a relatively small utility in southern Ontario that is integrating into an intelligent network many aspects of what is typically included in smart grid including intelligent netwrok devices, self healing networks, smart meters, distributed generation, electric vehicles (EV) , factory ride-through systems (enables factories to continue functioning through outages), battery-based electric storage, bidirectional communications network linking the intelligent devices to the control center, and dramatically increased volumes of real-time data.

Most utilities, large and small, are experiencing or very soon will experience a similar change in the customer services, responsivness, and level of reliability their electric power networks are expected to provide. 

An important difference between large utilities and small utiltiies, many of which are municipally-owned or rural coops, is that large utilities have the IT staff and experience to deal with intelligent electric power networks whereas small utilities often don't. 

Hosted solution

What struck me as as so unique about what Terraspatial is offering and so valuable to small utilities is that it is a hosted solution, in other words, all the utility needs to install at their site is a browser, everything else is running in the cloud.  The most important benefit of a hosted solution like this is that it reduces the level of IT capacity that the utility needs to maintain in house.

One of the utility associations that Terraspatial has been working with is the Central Services Association (CSA), an association of 116 smaller utilities, in central Mississippi.  Jointly Terraspatial and CSA have developed the requirements for a hosted solution called PlantWorx for electric power utilities.  Based on thes requirements, Terraspatial has designed and built, and CSA has been testing a solution called PlantWorx.

The design goals of the solution that CSA and Terraspatial have developed are very relevant to small utilities. 

• It is hosted, which means that the utility does not need to own or manage servers or software. 
• It is secure because it relies on the security of Rackspace a major cloud hosting provider that can provide a level of security, including protection from internal tampering, role-based access by users, protection from external  threats, the latest encryption, redundancy and back-ups, ISO certified data centers, and mirrored servers for persistent backup, in other words a much higher level of security than the average utility network is capable of.
• Because it it running in the cloud, it is accessible from anywhere and from any device, in the office and in the field.
• It is an integrated work order management sytem solution supports staking through to accounting and reporting.  It interfaces to customer information systems, accounting and billing systems, and materials management systems,
• It provides a dashboard allowing the utility to monitor key performance indicators of the utility's business.

GITA PNW: Modern web portals for utilities - asynchronously updatable mashups and standards-based

At the 12th annual Geospatial Information and Technology (GITA) Pacific Northwest Conference at Salishan on the Oregon Coast, Michael Baker gave an enlightening presentation on web portals and how modern architectures make it possible for them to be much more than a flashy website.

A modern web portal is a web-based, business-critical system that integrates information,  business applications, and views to create a collaborative environment for managing utility workflows such as outage management, vegetation management, inspections, reliability, and other critical workflows.

The most important factor that differentiates modern web portals is that a modern web architecture (which is based on a service oriented architecture or SOA) allows data from many independent, data sources to be mashed together into a single web application in which each data source is independently (asynchronously) updatable.  Michael gave a simple example in which the base map came from Google Map, point outage data from a utility's outage mamagement system, weather data from an external weather service, and an additional aggregation layer provided a dashboard showing the utility's key performance indicators.

The other important factor that differentiates modern web portals is that they are standards-based.  Michael specifically mentioned Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards such as WMS, WFS and WCS that enable the integration of data from different geospatial applications from different vendors, ESRI, Intergraph, Autodesk and others.

He also provided guidelines on how to go about creating a utility portal.  He recommended focussing on how the portal helps the utility's business needs, and how critical clearly understood business needs are to defining good portal requirements.  He also made the interesting point that a portal is often the first step a utility makes toward a service oriented architecture.  Finally, he recommended that if you listen carefully to your business users, you will be able to create a shared vision for the portal including how it will be used and how it will benefit your utility. 

As an example, I blogged previously about Burlington Hydro and the portal that AGSI has built for managing and analyzing in real-time large volumes of data coming from many intelligent electronic devices comprising a smart grid.

Webinar: Improving the design process at utilities

In the new world of rapid infrastructure change driven by smart grid, renewable energy, and increasing demand for low carbon electric power, clean water, and energy efficient transportation networks, utilities are striving to improve the quality of designs and to optimize the design workflow flow within the organization.  The additional challenge of a rapidly aging workforce means that design productivity, enabling experienced workers to be more productive and bringing younger, less experienced workers up to speed faster has become a prioritiy. 

Brockwell IT Consulting and Spatial Network Solutions are offering a webinar specifically for utilities interested in improving their design process.  The webinar will show best practices for improving the design process, staking, and GIS asset management through automation, .  Utility engineering, staking and GIS professionals will see how they can use the Utility Design Maturity Model to benchmark their organization’s process.

The webinar will take place July 26th at 12:00 noon CST.  You can register here.

FDO Provider for GE Smallworld makes VMDS data available to AutoCAD clients

The FDO Provider for GE Smallworld, developed by SBS, uses the Autodesk FDO data access technology to provide seamless, dynamic data access to GE's Smallworld. The FDO Provider for Smallworld eliminates the need for data translation, Smallworld Magik programming and custom integration development to access data in a Smallworld's VMDS database.

The FDO provider relies on the Smallworld Connector (SWConnector), a comprehensive API for GE Smallworld.  SWConnector is available in a specialized version for Autodesk’s AutoCAD Map 3D, AutoCAD Utility Design, AutoCAD Map 3D Enterprise and Autodesk Infrastructure Map Server applications. The FDO SW Connector Provider for Autodesk provides access to Smallworld data, allowing display, query, analysis and update via Autodesk products.

Feature Data Objects (FDO) technology is an open source project that enables Autodesk Geospatial products and enterprise applications to query, retrieve and update natively spatial data stored in relational databases, files and web-based services.

An introductory video to the FDO Provider for Smallworld is available on Youtube.  It demonstrates retrieving facilities from a Smallworld VMDS database and creating new features and updating and deleting existing features using an AutoCAD Map 3D client on the desktop   The updates are made in a short transaction database that is then played back and reviewed by a Smallworld operator while loading the job into the VMDS database.

Geospatial World Forum: How GDF Suez built a gas distribution asset management system in 10 months

At the Geospatial World Forum in Amsterdam, Radu Negoita, GIS Manager at GDF Suez Energy Romania, gave a fascinating overview of how GDF Suez has built a location aware asset management system in 10 months.  Natural gas is a rapidly growing source of energy that is cleaner from an emissions perspective than traditional energy sources such as coal.

GDF SUEZ Energy România has over 1.3 million customers and is a leader in the gas distribution and delivery market.  Its main buiness is the distribution of gas to consumers. The total gas distribution network managed by GDF Suez  is 16,000 km.  Natural gas distribution is a regulated activity to ensure the safe operation of the network which is comprised of  pipes, residential connections, regulator stations, sensors/measurement systems, and other types of assets.

Data acquisition

In 2007 GDF Suez initiated a data acquisition project to capture information including location about all their network assets.  It is an ongoing effort using using internal resources.  GDF Suez relies on GPS and total stations to capture accurate locations for their assets.

Asset management system

The objective of the asset management system is to improve the productivity of gas distribution operations by automating manual asset management processes.  The core is an asset management system that manages the assets in a centralized database (Oracle Spatial) and provides desktop (AutoCAD Map 3D) and web based tools (Autodesk Infrastructure Map Server) for optimizing data quality and providing secure access to the information across the organization. The core database relies on data versioning (long transactions) to manage asset updates safely in a production environment.  It relies on an open architecture to enable integration with SAP plant maintenance, SynerGEE network analysis, and other enterprise systems.  It supports design sketches and redlining of design drawings and provides multi-criteria analysis for investment planning.

Project development

The project lifetime was ten months which, based on my experience with similar asset management systems in a range of utilities, I find quite remarkable in terms of how fast the production system was delivered.  This involved a full project lifecycle including business requirements analysis, development of the hardware and software architecture, installation of Oracle Spatial database and configuring the gas network model, configuration and installation of the application, data migration and testing and training.  The solution was deployed and in production in 2010 and currently supports 600 active users.

The system provides automated data capture from field measurement systems, multi-user editing of asset location and properties, creation and editing of network topology, generation of job estimates, tabular and graphical reporting, and provides an operations dashboard for monitoring progress and the status of the network.

The desktop client is used for field data acquisition, creation of the new assets; geometry, attribute and topology editing and network state analysis.

The web client, which is used by the majority of the users, provides a viewer for attributes and geometry of the network; navigation and searching of maps, and report generation.

Plant maintenance

Plant maintenance is based on a maintenance plan for all assets of the network including pipes, residential connections, valves, regulator stations, and so on.  The master system which manages the assets is the geospatial asset management system. SAP- PM manages maintenance network assets in terms of preventive and corrective maintenance.  It also handles exceptions and other operations events on the network.

Future developoment

GDF Suez' future development plans include integration of the asset management system with the SCADA, SAP asset accounting, and workforce management enterprise systems.  They also intend to develop a crew routing and dispatch module and a mobile client for field staff.

Autodesk and Pitney Bowes Software announce strategic alliance

Autodesk and Pitney Bowes Software have announced that they have entered into a strategic alliance agreement that will serve as a framework for both companies to provide resources, services and solutions to help infrastructure owners and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) organizations across the plan, design, build, manage lifecycle of infrastructure. The agreement will enable Autodesk and Pitney Bowes Software to provide infrastructure professionals in transportation, government, utilities, and other key industries with a broad range of coordinated solutions for planning and asset management, design and operations and management. Under the terms of the strategic alliance agreement, Pitney Bowes Software and Autodesk will join forces to provide integrated GIS, analytics, BIM and asset management solutions to better address the needs of a global customer base. In addition, through coordinating the integration of existing applications, both companies will work together to deliver solutions which address some of the more immediate business issues within a number of vertical markets.  The strategic alliance agreement also provides both organizations with the opportunity to develop specific, industry related, solutions in the future using the industry knowledge, products and services of both companies.

AU: Optimizing the information flow from designers to construction to records

One of the major challenges facing the world's utilities is one of data management, optimizng information flows that involve multiple divisions within a utility. I have blogged about this challenge on multiple occasions (here, here, here and here).  

The basic process for designing, building and operating and maintaining a utilities network is essentially the same the world over and involves a cumbersome, inefficient, paper-based process.  Designers or planners create the initial design, called a construction drawing. Construction crews, often comprised of sub-contractors, build the facilities using paper construction drawings.  During construction, the drawing may be marked up or redlined to reflect changes in the original design.  After construction is completed, the construction drawing, now referred to as an "as-built", is forwarded to the records department.  The records department redrafts the as-built into the permanent records database, which is maintained as the company's record of its network infrastructure.

The records database is used for a variety of activities such as reports about the network requested by the regulator or by management. For work relating to connecting or disconnecting customers to the network, adding new services, repairing or replacing network facilities, the records department is responsible for preparing facilities maps to assist field staff.  The symptoms associated with this process are as-built backlogs stretching from months to years, high error rates, and data quality.  Inaccurate and out-of-date records reduce the productivity of field staff and even impact safety, the primary concern of all gas and electric utilities.

Pacific Gas and Electric

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is one of the largest combined natural gas an electric utilities in the U.S. PG&E is based in San Francisco and serves 15 million people, about half of California's population.  

Steve Parker, EO Mapping Manager at PG&E, gave an insightful presentation at Autodesk University about the information flow challenge that PG&E is working to resolve, optimizing the flow of information from designers (Estimating), through the people who build the facilities (Construction) to records (Mapping).  As Steve expressed it their goal was to minimize the effort required to capture the true representation of the final installed assets by capturing the pertinent data into PG&E systems as early in the workflow as possible, in other words, to make it easier to share graphical information between Estimating, Construction, and Mapping.  Complicating issues include the lack of defined and enforced standards for network documentation (records).  Though it sounds simple, changing this process is an incredibly difficult undertaking because it affects a lot of people and involves changing business processes that date from Thomas Edison.  As Steve said, "We are going to make history".  

Eliminating redrafting

The most critical business process improvment is pre-posting designs directly into the records database, rather than redrafting the information from paper as-builts. If as-builts come back from the field with redlines, all that needs to be entered into the records database are the redlines.  

The direct benefit is eliminating the as-built backlog, with the important benefit that the records database is more uptodate.  Another benefit is fewer errors, because data is captured electronically rather than being manually redrafted from paper as-builts. 

Aging workforce and productivity

Another major benefit is improved efficiency and productivity.  PG&E, like many other utilities, is facing the challenge of an aging workforce.  For example, Steve said that half of PG&E's mappers are eligible to retire right now.  Streamlining information flows by eliminating paper helps both designers and mappers to be more efficient and takes a lot of repetiive drudgery out of the process.

Eliminating paper maps

Another important benefit is that it enables PG&E to get away from paper maps.  An advantage of electornic maps is that they can provide information in real-time.  Secondly, it means that printing 80,000 maps periodically is no longer necessary with savings of upto $8 million per year.