Autodesk University Utility Symposium

On Monday here in Las Vegas at Autodesk University the Utility Symposium attracted an overflow crowd of utility folks.  It was an opportunity to exchange information and to hear presentations from a number of utilities across North America including water and electric power utilities.

Electrical Distribution Design

Tim Boucher and Paul Joseph gave an overview of business drivers at Southern California Edison (SCE) and some of the projects underway for meeting their business objectives.  SCE plans to invest on the order of $30 billion in renewable energy and smart grid related infrastructure, including new transmission lines, over the next decade. 

One of the SCE's primary business drivers is efficiency, because they have to do more with what they have. Tim and Paul described the Graphical Design Tool (GDT) project at SCE.  GDT is designed to provide designers with tools to help them do their job better.  It is a rule-based design application that provides electrical design functions such as voltage drop and flicker calculations; mechanical design functions such guying, pulling tension, sag analysis, and wind loading; as well as bill of materials and job estimates, in an AutoCAD-based desktop application. GDT not only provides tools that experienced designers find useful, but helps newly hired, younger, less experienced designers to get up to speed sooner.  Tim described the process for deploying GDT across SCE's territory to about 600 designers and supervisors.  Paul demonstrated some very cool GDT add-ons for multiplanar cable pulling tension, house corner loading, pole modeling, and Google Earth integration.

Tim outlined some of their next business priorities, which are all on my top 12 utility priorities list, including

• single landbase (they currently have five)
• single point of truth for all spatial data
• reducing their as-built backlog from a year to days
• enabling field staff in the field to be able to see the same spatial information in the field that the people in the office can see.

Sub-station Rehabilitation

Arnold Fry of Duke Energy talked about substation design and redesign.  At Duke Energy they have developed the Substation Design Solution (SFS) which automates the design of electrical control systems, uses model-based design for the structural design, manages a library of reusable components, automates the creation of the BOM, and helps the different disciplines to collaborate in developing the final design through 3D visualization, which enables the engineers to see how the different components fit together.

Duke Energy estimates that SDS will reduce design time by at least 50% for both greenfield and brownfield projects.  The Duke Energy SDS will be coming on line just at the time when the company is accelerating its smart grid deployment and will enable it to pursue an ambitious substation retrofit program.

Wastewater Treatment Plant Expansion

Asa Reese of Parsons talked about the Advanced Wastewater Treatment Expansion Project at DeKalb County, Georgia.  DeKalb decided to double their water treatment capacity using innovative membrane bio-reactor (MBR) technology.  This is a large, nearly one billion dollar project involving over 50 people and 10 disciplines.  Parsons, the firm DeKalb selected to design the water treatment expansion, decided early on to take a model-based design approach to enable collaboration between the different design teams and to use 3D visualization tools to ensure that the stakeholders, technical and non-technical, were able to participate in critical design decisions. Asa described how model-based design enabled Parsons to change the design process from a traditional linear approach, which Asa suggested is analogous to a relay race or tag team approach, to a parallel process based on collaboration between the teams.  Asa emphasized that changing the design process has been critical in keeping the design project within budget and on schedule.

Comments

[Varinder Singh]

Is there a video on AU regarding Electrical Distribution Design by Tim Boucher and Paul Joseph. We are really intested in the Graphic design tool for sags and tension calculations and pole design. Is there any other information that I can read on this tool.

[Geoff]

The underlying application is Autodesk Utility Design which you can find out more about at

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?id=734508&siteID=123112