Between the Poles

New underground infrastructure standard to be launched in April

In a previous post I alluded to the imminence of the new PAS 256 standard "Buried services – Collection, recording and sharing of location information  data" which is intended to complement the existing PAS 128 standard.

In the UK the total length of buried infrastructure is in excess of 4 million kilometres. The new PAS is intended to provide recommendations for the collection, recording and sharing of location information data relating to:underground assets and any associated above ground assets; decommissioned assets; and abandoned assets.The PAS is expected to set out a consistent, accessible data protocol to enable effective recording and sharing of the location, state, and nature of buried assets, and recommends how existing asset  records should be updated, recorded and collated. The PAS is also intended to cover the gathering of geospatial data using absolute or relative accuracy, plus associated evidence (such as photographic evidence).

The new standard has been through a public review and will be launched April 11, 2017 at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London..

OGC issues RFI for underground infrastructure maps and models

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced the initiation of a three-phase project to develop interoperability standards for underground infrastructure. The underground infrastructure data interoperability project will take two and a half years to complete and will involve the collaboration of many cities, utilities, and engineering and technology companies.

In the U.S. it is estimated that an underground utility is hit about every minute.  Underground utility conflicts and relocations are the number one cause for project delays during road construction.  Assuming the average cost of underground strikes is roughly $1000 per strike, the estimated total cost to the U.S. economy is $1.5 trillion annually.  Currently, the exchange of underground utility information between infrastructure organizations within the same jurisdiction or in adjacent jurisdictions has been greatly hampered by incompatible and incomplete data. OGC anticipates that this project will make a significant contribution towards facilitating improved information management and secure sharing and collaboration, which should make infrastructure planning, operations & maintenance, and emergency response less costly and time consuming, and more effective.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has issued a Request for Information (RFI) to inform a Concept Development Study (CDS) that will assess the current state and future direction of information standards for modelling, mapping, and managing underground infrastructure.

The CDS will define the scope of a multi-phase underground infrastructure interoperability project. The purpose of the study is to develop an in-depth understanding of all the components necessary to enable infrastructure data interoperability and standards in an underground environment. The CDS is initially focused on the urban landscape. This RFI is a first step in the CDS process. Any organization with an interest in underground infrastructure is invited to respond to the RFI before 15 March 2017.

This initiative is supported by the Fund for the City of New York, the Singapore Land Authority, the Ordnance Survey and the OGC Innovation Program.

Bentley Systems and AGI support open source 3D geospatial

Back in 2006 Autodesk was the leading sponsor supporting the formation of the Open Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) in order to open geospatial technology to a wider audience.  Now Bentley Systems has joined with AGI to form the Cesium Consortium.  The consortium was started to accelerate open-source Cesium development and support long-term open-source Cesium sustainability.

AGI developed Cesium, which is a JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps in a web browser without a plugin. Cesium is open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

Regulators encourage utilities to invest in cloud-based software

Utilities have in general not been IT innovators.  But the accelerating adoption of smart-grid technologies by utilities is resulting is driving the need for greater IT awareness and skills in the electric power industry.   Large utilities have the requisite IT skills in house.  Small utilities typically don't and outsource their IT development or adopt SaaS solutions.   Medium-sized utilities fall in between.  Now regulators appear to be ready to provide financial encouragement to push utilities to improve their IT capacity.  Cloud-based computing is perceived by regulators as providing a way to future-proof IT investment in the rapidly changing smart grid world. 

At Distributech 2017 Oracle released the results of a survey of utility industry regulators.  Oracle Utilities and Zpryme surveyed 76 utility regulatory staff and commissioners in the U.S.  What they found was that more than three quarters of the respondents believe that regulators should play some role in determining whether utilities use the cloud. 69% of U.S. regulators support capitalizing cloud-based software, which is a way to use accounting to encourage utilities to invest in cloud-based software.  A third of the regulators have a specific and comprehensive strategy for utility cloud investment.  The most significant benefit of cloud computing the respondents identified was improved flexibility.

Utility industry vendors urged to adopt data model standard

Software comes and goes, but a utility's data model persists. A shared electric power data model enables electric power utilities to move away from incompatible point solutions toward tightly integrated solutions which are essential for real-time monitoring, situational assessment and decision making.  Based on today's smart devices and sensors and utility-wide communications network, decision making in a real-time, big data world requires tight integration between applications.  To realize the full potential of the smart grid, utility industry vendors need to move rapidly to adopt data model standards, that's the recommendation of Geoff Cameron of AGSI. which has developed a platform based on a utility data model standard that provides real-time access to critical infrastructure, customer and operational information. 

 

Traditional electric utilities are typically departmentalized and rely on manual, paper-based processes. Sharing knowledge is relatively slow, cumbersome, and reactive in nature and characterized by redundant data, many incompatible point solutions and non-real-time.  Facilities are inspected periodically, data is accumulated and analyzed, a report is written and sometime in the future do something is done.  Today's intelligent electronic devices, bidirectional communications networks, and automation provide the basis for dramatically improving a utility's SAIDI and SAIFI outage statistics.  It also provides a foundation for transactive energy.  What is required to realize the full potential of the smart grid is a platform that enables real-time integrated applications.

 

At Distributech 2017 Dan Guatto, COO and VP of Engineering and Operations, described how Burlington Hydro (BHI), a distribution utility with 65,500 customers, has evolved from a point solution environment to an integrated, secure, and real-time utility.  As is typical of many distribution utilities, BHI was facing increased technology sophistication, the need integrated business workflows (operations, engineering, customer engagement, financial) to improve efficiency.  BHI had to address siloed legacy systems and business processes.  Many industry solution offerings fixed individual problems but were expensive and did not take into account integration and long term data management.  Many “enterprise” offerings in the marketplace were proprietary black box solutions with little flexibility that made BHI feel that it was surrendering control of its data and processes.  One of the major problems BHI identified was the lack of O.T. / I.T. convergence for true enterprise efficiency.   Solutions required quite expensive capital outlay and deployment.  Projects became too big and and bogged down and were unable to address fast paced industry change.  In Ontario some of the larger utilities made significant technology investments, but at the end of the day these projects were extremely expensive, disjointed and largely underutilized (or even abandoned). BHI was also concerned about the infancy of smart grid technology and rapid future changes and didn't want to be tied to an inflexible system as the speed of industry changes accelerated.  BHI was convinced that a sound system architecture had to be based on electric industry standards and was aware that AGSI had been working with EPRI on a real-time platform based on Common Information Model (CIM) and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards.

 

Over the past decade open electric power data model standards have been developed for transmission, distribution, smart substations and other electric power functions.  Worldwide the Common Information Model (CIM) has become the standard for transmission.  CIM is also widely used outside of North America for distribution.  In North America the Multispeak standard is the most widely used distribution data model standard, although CIM is used by larger utilities.  These data models are mature and cover virtually all aspects of electric power utility operations.

CIM was originally developed for standardizing electric utility information exchange.  It was designed by electrical engineers, adopted by the IEC and supported by EPRI and multiple electric utility partners, vendors and organizations.  The IEC, EPRI and partners continue to extend the model to cover asset health, station design, work, smart grid integration, IoT Integration, and network operating protocols.  CIM is able to support all aspects of electrical operations (OMS/DMS), electric analysis / smart grid, distributed energy (DER), work orders, crew management, and assets.  AGSI has implemented the CIM Core, Topology, Wires, & Assets object models in a relational database (Oracle Spatial).  Its implementation represents a real-time network model of the CIM electric system data model and provides a centralized view and interaction with the network in real-time.

 

Today this technology connects and integrates engineering, SCADA, AMI, GIS, load analysis, other smart grid deployments such as EV charging, customer, and asset databases into a single accessible platform and enabled BHI to evolve from a point solution environment to an integrated, secure, and real-time utility.  Real-time data unification provides a basis for transparent workflows and a centralized reliable source of truth enables advanced analytics for optimized investment planning.  An open architecture based on industry standards provides the flexibility to adapt to rapid changes in technology as the smart grid evolves. Real-time information sharing enables faster decision making and increased customer satisfaction via real-time situational awareness about outages and planned work.  Don Guatto believes that it provides the foundation for transactive energy which is looming on every utility's horizon.

U.S. governors urge Trump to support renewable energy and grid modernization

The Governors' Wind and Solar Energy Coalition (GWSC), representing 20 U.S. state governors, both Democratic and Republican, sent a letter to President Trump presenting the benefits of renewable energy, arguing for a Federal commitment to support renewable energy and grid modernization, analytics and simulation and to streamline regulation of the grid.

The letter outlines how renewable energy is providing jobs and investment to low-income U.S. counties. For example, U.S. wind facilities pay rural landowners $222 million a year, with most of it going to landowners in areas with below-average incomes. $100 billion has been invested by companies in low-income counties, where some 70 percent of the nation’s wind farms are located.  Wind energy currently generates five percent of U.S. power demand. Last year, the country’s solar industry employed over 200,000 and added 31,000 new  jobs. Most of the installations are in rural areas and have provided landowners another income option.

Furthemore, the letter argues that any national infrastructure legislation introduced in Congress should provide significant funding for grid modernization. The complexity of the U.S. aging, multi-state grid makes the need for sophisticated modeling and analysis critically important. The GWSC asks the President to create a new state-federal task force, in conjunction with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the National Laboratories, to examine options to  modernize and streamline state and federal regulatory processes.

The GWSC suggests that if the United States does not continue robust federal research and development programs in wind  and solar energy, China will assume leadership and see most of the economic benefits in these critical technologies. The Governors make the case that the growth of the renewable energy industry is an American success story built on federal research and development, state policy leadership, private sector investment, and ingenuity.

Planet Labs' 144 satellites can image entire Earth every day

Yesterday Planet Labs launched 88 Dove satellites to orbit. They were launched on a PSLV rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India.  Planet Labs now operates 144 satellites in low Earth orbit. Each of the latest satellites has a 200 mbps downlink speed and is capable of collecting over 2 million km² per day which means that the entire constellation has the capability to image all of Earth’s landmass every day.  Planet Monitoring allows you to define an area of interest which can be local, regional, national, or global in scale and a frequency with which to receive imagery: daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.  Applications include energy, mining, finance, and critical infrastructure for power or transport.

New rules for UAV operation by electric power utilities including beyond visual line of sight

New rules for commercially operating UAVs in the U.S. have been published by the FAA as Part 107 of the Federal Aviation Regulations.  These cover commercial uses of drones weighing less than 55 pounds.  First and foremost the rules requires that the UAV be kept within unaided sight.  However,  you can request a waiver of most operational restrictions if you can show that your proposed operation can be conducted safely.  As I blogged a year ago Xcel Energy obtained a waiver to fly UAVs for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations.  Furthermore on July 15, 2016, President Obama signed the FAA Extension, Safety, and Security Act of 2016. The 2016 Act requires the FAA to establish a process to allow certain UAV operations related to utilities, pipelines, and oil and gas production to be conducted beyond the visual line of sight (bvlos) of the operator and either in the daytime or nighttime.

The maximum speed is 87 knots and you can’t fly a small UAV over people who are not directly participating in the operation.  But also interestingly, operations are allowed from a moving vehicle if flying over a sparsely populated area.  Since transmission lines traverse sparsely populated corridors, utilities are now using UAVs piloted from moving vehicles for vegetation management for transmission lines.

Secondly, to operate a small UAV under Part 107, you need a remote pilot airman certificate with a small UAV rating.  The drone itself does not have to be registered with the FAA.  The maximum allowable altitude is 400 feet above the ground.  But interestingly it can fly higher if the drone remains within 400 feet of a structure. This allows drones to be used on construction sites of tall structures, for example.

Tree contacts account for 30% of outages in North America.  For example, trees caused the 2003 blackout of the Northeast. The new regulations mandated in the 2016 Act would enable low cost, fully automated scanning of transmission lines for vegetation management as required by NERC (NERC FAC-003-3).  By combining LiDAR scanning on a UAV platform with automated extraction of transmission lines spans, pylons and vegetation and identification of vegetation encroachment risks, it is now conceivable that in the near-future outages due to vegetation interaction with transmission lines can be dramatically reduced because scanning is becoming much less expensive.

OGC initiates development of interoperability standards for underground infrastructure

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced today the initiation of a three-phase project to develop interoperability standards for underground infrastructure.  The project is supported by the Fund for the City of New York and its sister organization, the National Center for Civic Innovation, the Ordnance Survey and other organizations. The underground infrastructure data interoperability project will take two and a half years to complete and will involve the collaboration of many cities, utilities, and engineering and technology companies.

About 4 million excavations are carried out on the UK road network each year to install or repair buried utility pipes and cables. Not knowing the location of buried assets causes practical problems that increase costs and delay projects, but more importantly, it increases the risk of injury for utility owners, contractors and road users. The problems associated with inaccurate location of buried pipes and cables are serious and are rapidly worsening due to the increasing density of underground infrastructure in major urban areas.  In the U.S. it is estimated that an underground utility is hit about every minute.  Underground utility conflicts and relocations are the number one cause for project delays during road construction.  Assuming the average cost of underground strikes is roughly $1000 per strike, the estimated total cost to the U.S. economy is $1.5 trillion annually.

In addition to excavations for construction another prevalent problem with undergound infrastructure are cross bores.  Cross bores are gas, power or telecom cables and pipes that bisect sewer pipes.  Horizontal directional drilling (HDD), percussion moles and plows are trenchless techniques used to install natural gas distribution and other utility lines. These boring drill heads can easily go through sewer pipes without the driller being aware of it. Since the location of underground sewer pipes, either main line or laterals connecting the main pipes to houses, are only poorly known, cross bores are widespread. Increased recognition of the injury, death and damage caused from cross bores has resulted in federal and state regulatory action. For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2011 Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s (PHMSA) requirements of Distribution Integrity Management Program (DIMP) is intended to increase the integrity of gas distribution systems. Finding these problems is big business.  It is estimated that in the U.S. the total market for identifying and geolocating cross bores is about $1 billion per year.

An economic analysis of the costs and benefits of applying GPR to detect the location of underground infrastructure in Milan estimated that the return on investment is about €16 for every euro invested in improving the reliability information of underground infrastructure.  For comparison the ROI in the United States has been estimated to range up to $21 for every dollar invested. This does not include other important, but non-quantifiable benefits including better safety for both workers and the public as well as fewer traffic disruptions.

In the U.S. there is the ASCE standard (A,B,C,D) that is widely used for classifying location information about underground infrastructure according to its estimated reliability.  The U.S. standard does not include explicit precision.  A,B, C, and D refer to different ways of collecting information about underground infrastructure.

In France there is a standard that define three levels of cartographic accuracy for underground structures. The French standard defines explicitly levels precision.

In the UK the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 128 developed under the auspices of the British Standards Institution (BSI) and sponsored by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE).  It not only includes A,B, C, D levels similar to the U.S. standard, but also includes explicit levels of precision levels (Bx).

Currently, the exchange of underground utility information between infrastructure organizations within the same jurisdiction or in adjacent jurisdictions has been greatly hampered by incompatible and incomplete data. OGC anticipates that this project will make a significant contribution towards facilitating improved information management, sharing and collaboration which should make infrastructure planning, operations and maintenance, and emergency response less costly and time consuming, and more effective.

Underground infrastructure networks play essential roles in supplying the resources necessary to make communities livable and functional. Each of these networks can be found alongside each other under city streets, and every building has multiple connections. Interdependencies between different underground networks make things even more complex. In addition to modelling the underground infrastructure, the project will look at ways to model the soil and related components that surround the underground infrastructure networks. These components can affect the ageing and maintenance schedules of infrastructure, and include bedrock, the water table, underground streams, adjacent water bodies, foundations, basements, sidewalks, sidewalk vaults, street beds, etc.

The OGC underground infrastructure project will be undertaken in parallel with efforts by the City of New York to assess its own infrastructure information and to find ways of improving integration, analysis, and emergency response while ensuring data security. It is expected that the projects will be mutually supportive.

Crowdsourcing outage reporting

Everytime I attend Distributech I come across something that simply knocks my socks off.  Alan McMorran of Open Grid Systems has been working with Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) and Electricity North West (ENW) on a "Grid Reporter" application that crowdsources information from users with smart phones about outages. 

 

When someone encounters a line down, no power, or damaged equipment situation, they can report the problem from a smart phone with a minimum of hassle - no logging in or entering a location or address.  The application uses the GPS on the smart phone to determine location.  It allows the person reporting the problem to take a picture.  It is able to record which direction (heading) the phone was directed when the picture was taken. 

On the server side the application takes the location and heading and does a geospatial lookup to identify nearby candidates for the specific piece or pieces of equipment the user has identified.  If the user's phone is on a wireless network, it will even suggest which facilities may be the problem and request clarification from the user.  Based on the information provided by the user and the user's smart phone, the application generates an outage report with the details including the specific CIM data element needed by the utility's outage folks to respond.  The server-side requires less than 100 milliseconds of processing to respond to the user.

The server side application resides in the cloud and is scalable so that if this is a storm situation and many calls are being fielded, it can rapidly scale up the necessary computing resources.

 

Another feature is that it is able to push outage status messages to the users reporting problem so that they are kept aware of any danger and progress in resolving the problem. 

 

This strikes me as a way to dramatically improve the collection of outage information by broadening the user base of potential reporters at very low cost.  It also enhances the customer-utility interaction and because it provides feedback it encourages customers and other users to report problems.  In the UK there is another important driver and that is because of the nature of how the electric power industry is organized.  Customers often do not know who to call when they encounter a problem, the network operator or the retailer they buy power from.  With this application they don't need to know because the application automatically connects to the right folks.

 

From an implementation point of view the server-side application assumes that it has access to a network model that uses the Common Information Model (CIM) electric power distribution model standard.  Any utility that has a network model that is CIM-compliant should be able to integrate the application without a great deal of difficulty.