Between the Poles

An infrastructure digital twin provides a dynamic environment for managing underground assets of a multi-utility campus

For organizations managing a campus such as educational facilities, healthcare facilities, commercial real estate, utilities, and municipalities managing public works, storm sewer systems, and parks which are characterized by having many different utilities and and other infrastructure, an infrastructure digital twin provides owners, operators and third-parties with a streamlined, cloud-based solution that maps, manages and shares a wide range of subsurface and above ground assets, including fibre, pipes, electric power cables, lighting, conduits, and other structures enabling campus asset owners to not only track their assets but to provide all the information about their assets; their history, their replacement cost and their current cost without which you cannot justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

Infrastructure digital twin

A major challenge for legacy asset management systems is that documents are hard to access. Problems in the field are hard to identify because it takes too long to access the relevant documents and other information in the field. It's hard to share architecture and utility drawings with contractors and other stakeholders. People are really copying large blueprints or as-builts and delivering a set of documents to a new contractor who's just been onboarded and the contractor has to spend weeks studying these documents and comparing this information to what's there, what's underground, what's above ground and matching it together.

The way we address this challenge is by creating an infrastructure digital twin which provides accessible information to all stakeholders through a subscription service. A full digital twin of your campus, is a big, costly project, but an infrastructure digital twin is simpler and much faster. It involves site verification and infrastructure mapping as a service including drone imaging, site surveying, walking the campus and verifying objects. If the customer is using some type of infrastructure detection, the accurate information from that system plugs into our system, so it remains live. We support Open Geospatial Consortium standards to ensure interoperability. We onboard all of the data and we do that for any new updates on the campus. If something is wrong in the map and it's not in the site, or in site and not in the map, or if the drone gave us a better accuracy, we detect that and make corrections. For example, customers often hire utility engineering firms to conduct subsurface utility surveys (SUE).  We load that information and match it with everything we have in the system about their underground and other assets. Full onboarding requires 40 days or less. And more importantly, all the data is owned by the client all the time.

We've loaded over four million assets for our customers. Those assets are being used by thousands of users, including facilities, teams, construction managers, engineering and architecture firms, local utilities, fire departments and others.

You can share data immediately with anyone you want. And there are no limits on the number of users in any of our systems. If you onboard a new construction company for a new project, you just provide them with a login, specify what they can access and see, and they are onboard.

Dynamic view of your assets

The system provides a dynamic view of all your assets. It's not a static image, GIS or CAD files which you update every several months. It's real time, live presentation of information coming from a database and it is integrated with all your other systems. You can drill down on every single conduit, cable, pipe, or other piece of infrastructure and query all its attributes and see the sources of the data. You have access to the data in real time from your phone, your tablet, or your laptop because it is a fully cloud solution. We are able to do that because we are compliant with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and follow OGC standards. We are using open systems in terms of representing all the attributes about every item.  For a typical campus environment, ranging from a few blocks to a college campus or hospital complex, for example, you may have 20,000 assets. All of those assets and their associated attributes are captured and live in that database. We're building IOT integration, so you will have real time data on top of their various asset layers. You can see the water flow and the temperature and the pressure from the sensors. To go back to the updates. We are building integration with augmented reality. so that all underground assets can be visualized in 3D AR.

We provide a dynamic way of having base maps. You can use Google Maps, Esri World Imagery, or OpenStreetMap or even a mix of these. You can add your own imagery. 

In addition to the dynamic view of the locations and attributes of all your assets, you also have a plan room. All your documents are there, your engineering drawings, as-builts, survey and SUE reports, legacy maps, and other sources of underground data. You can search them by date or by the contractor or surveyor who supplied this data to you. These documents are accessible to you at any time from any device.

Managing asset budgeting

More importantly, the system provides an executive summary of all your assets. For example, in this site, which we have built as an example (we cannot share real data publicly) we have included about $4 million worth of assets. FM people need to deliver projects on time, minimize disruption of services to those people who are using these facilities, and improve the sustainability of their facilities. To do this requires that you can justify your CAPEX and OPEX budget. For some capital projects, you might be able to look at the total cost for adding a new building. But for budgets for operations and maintenance, retrofitting a fiber network, changing your irrigation network, it's really difficult to do that without having access to everything about your assets, their history, their replacement cost and their current cost. Without this information you cannot justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

The key to managing budgets is by replacement costs. If you want to replace your electric network, you need to know how you built the electric network in the first place. The database provides access to all this information. You can break your assets down by type of structure; electric power, conduits, lighting, water, wastewater and gas pipe networks. You can see their life expectancy, aggregate them based on their expected time of expiry and then decide on remedial action. You also need to worry about the impact of potential accidents and most importantly your liabilities. If a major underground gas line is damaged, then you might face heavy liabilities because it might interrupt gas service not just to your campus but for the entire area or even an entire municipality.

Our system has an ROI calculator so you can compute your potential savings. This has helped customers secure grants because they were able to compute the information needed to submit a bid bond.

Conclusion

An infrastructure digital twin provides immediately accessible information to all your assets for all stakeholders through a subscription service. It's a real time, live presentation of information coming from a database and it is integrated with all your other systems. For critical budgeting operations and maintenance, you have immediate access to everything about your assets; their history, their replacement cost and their current cost that enables you to justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

This post is based on Moufid Charafeddine's (BetterGIS) talk at Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF).

Streamlining connectivity for all with open, decentralized data

Guest post by Wade Anderson, Vice President, SMB, IQGeo

5G is predicted to have the same economic impact on the US as commercializing the internet did 25 years ago. The technology is the motor of a new data economy built around artificial intelligence, autonomy, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things. 5G is essential to produce and transport data and new knowledge faster and more seamlessly to support an increasingly digital and interconnected economy. The proliferation of IoT applications across industries is showing no signs of slowing down, presenting a huge opportunity for business growth. According to GSMA, the global IoT market will be worth $900 billion in revenue by 2025 – an almost threefold increase on 2019.

With global 5G adoption expected to almost triple in 2021, the distribution of telecoms networks will need to grow to match this projected demand. The US has ambitious plans to achieve nationwide 5G coverage through a combination of state incentives and market forces. The Biden administration pledged $100bn to improve broadband infrastructure across the nation, with the ultimate aim of providing high-speed broadband connectivity for all Americans by 2029. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring connectivity for all has risen further up the agenda for the telecoms industry and for municipalities, government agencies, universities and corporates that support their own fiber and 5G networks.

Major US telecoms providers are deploying superfast Ultra-Wideband 5G services across cities, stadia, and airports. The US is also ahead of many other advanced countries in allocating high-band and low-band spectra for 5G. North America has the world’s largest share of the market in ‘dark fiber’, unused additional capacity that could help share and spread 5G coverage. Yet the breadth of coverage is patchy and inconsistent and lags behind competitors such as South Korea and China. There has been growing frustration with the pace of the rollout across much of the US. There are also concerns over the lack of market diversity and the limited number of vendors following the US ban on Huawei. There remain major challenges in filling gaps in provision, particularly in remote and rural areas where major new infrastructure investment from large providers is unviable. Currently, it is estimated that over a third of Americans living in rural areas lack access to a quality standard of broadband.

Yet the expansion of high-speed broadband to all states and regions is essential to ensure equality of connectivity. To reach rural or small-town locations we cannot rely solely on major telecoms operators but need a diverse market of innovative providers, Wireless Internet service providers (WISPs), and organizations such as transport, governmental, and commercial operators willing to lease out bandwidth. These smaller providers can help complement large networks to reach under-served areas that may not be commercially viable for major infrastructure investment.

Tackling information silos to accelerate rollout

A major challenge that organizations continue to face is the existence of information silos which prevent organizations from planning the most efficient and effective paths to new markets and wider coverage. There is often a lack of structured network documentation as many smaller operators have not implemented a System of Record (SoR) which identifies an authoritative data source for each data element. In addition, there continue to be silos between workflows such as maintenance and construction and between datasets such as geospatial data and data such as asset records, repairs, or upgrades. Providers need to be able to integrate everything from meteorological to economic data with internal processes and workflows to spot new hazards or opportunities.

For example, data from the nearby natural or built environment, such as trees that could obstruct signals or tall buildings that could host 5G antennae, is crucial to maintenance schedules and planning new provision. Similarly, integrating accurate geospatial information on existing networks with data on nearby infrastructure would help organizations identify opportunities to lease out ‘dark fiber’ to others, thereby organically increasing nationwide 5G networks. Open, decentralized internal data is critical to speed up the deployment of 5G and foster a healthy, competitive culture across the industry. A diverse, dynamic telecoms market able to collectively achieve nationwide coverage will require more open and dynamic telecoms data.

To facilitate more agile broadband infrastructure planning, organizations must develop system of record (SoR) strategies and break down internal silos by encouraging efficient and joined-up data sharing. Operators should make their internal geospatial network data accessible to all departments so they can seamlessly incorporate external data such as street maps or satellite data into all their survey, construction, and maintenance processes. Geospatial network data forms a ‘digital thread’ connecting all external data to a specific location in the network and thus revealing the subtle interdependencies between networks and their local environment.

Opening up their internal systems so that disparate departments and divisions can seamlessly incorporate relevant external data into all processes. For example, IBM Weather Group’s LIDAR and satellite data on vegetation cover could be overlaid onto geospatial network data to help companies plan new 5G antennae to minimize signal obstruction from nearby vegetation. Similar organizations could open their datasets to telecoms companies to help create a complete picture of the hazards and opportunities to network expansion. By integrating external data with internal network information, new market entrants could see opportunities for efficient deployment of broadband into new geographies and accelerate the process of ensuring nationwide coverage.

A flow of telecoms data between departments enables open, decentralized information sharing. Open-source, geospatial data supports smaller and larger telecoms players to maximize the reach of high-speed broadband, addressing the growing digital divide of nationwide connectivity.

The ‘dark fiber’ opportunity

Accurate, real-time geospatial data can also help organizations spot opportunities to lease out bandwidth. Many organizations are sitting on goldmines of unused, ‘dark fiber’ network capacity that could be sold to companies or leased to nearby communities to increase coverage. We helped a large university in the western US audit and update their network asset records and uncovered over 200 underutilized ‘dark’ broadband fibers, helping streamline their network and identify extra capacity. They also used advanced geospatial information systems to predict future capacity and find the most efficient pathways to coverage across their campus.

The same data could be shared with telecoms operators or other organizations to help plot the most effective paths to extend coverage using existing capacity. North America already leads the world in the ‘dark fiber’ networks market and has an opportunity to leverage this to accelerate the nationwide 5G coverage without new infrastructure spending. Discovering unused extra broadband capacity in this way helps to increase efficiency for large and small operators alike by allowing them to extract maximum coverage from minimal resources and grow revenue potential in the process.

Other companies are digitalizing and decentralizing their network data and making it accessible to everyone from field technicians to call-centre staff. These companies are moving away from traditional centralized GIS, siloed spreadsheets, proprietary apps, or paper maps towards ‘open’ network data that can be accessed from smartphones and tablets or exported through open APIs. This means that data on current networks can be easily merged with other datasets to spot opportunities to maximize coverage with minimal resources and risk.

Achieving nationwide 5G coverage and the digital transformation of the economy will require a parallel digital transformation of telecoms, fiber and 5G operators. Companies will need to embrace an open, transparent approach to capturing and sharing data while creating the ability to capture and integrate data from across all departments and external sources to develop a holistic picture of the risks and rewards across every region. This new digital transformation will demand the democratization and decentralization of all organizational data so that every operator can see the clearest and quickest route to reaching under-served communities across the country.

National digital twin is key to the UK government's transformation of the construction industry

The conjunction of the release of three UK government reports, Industrial Strategy Building A Britiain Fir for the Future, Transforming Infrastructure Performance, and Data for the Public Good, has set the stage for a transformation in how infrastructure is built, managed and operated in the UK. National digital twin is now a key concept for the UK government and BIM and geospatial are foundational for this digital replica of the national physical infrastructure.

Mark Enzer, chief technology officer at Mott MacDonald UK and proposed chair of the Digital Framework Task Group (DFTG) which is tasked to drive these reports’ implementation forward in his keynote at Geo Business 2018 in London, explained that there will be a greater focus on existing infrastructure.  Digital abundance where the cost of everything digital has dropped dramatically over the last couple of decades has transformed many industries from banks to airlines automobile manufacturing. Construction represents about 10 % of GDP and construction productivity has plateaued over the past 40 years whereas general industrial productivity has doubled. Mark pointed out that the UK has primarily mature infrastructure to maintain and operate and construction has to change to reflect this.

Based on the concept that data in the form of a national digital twin is just as important as physical assets, digital delivery and physical delivery go hand in hand. Key to digital delivery are BIM, geospatial, a common data environment, and asset information management.  A national digital twin would include above and below ground assets.

Managing this data is about making sense of it for better decision making. Fundamental to this process is rethinking value, not just the value of a finished building or infrastructure asset, but output per ‎£ over the entire lifecycle of an infrastructure asset. This means moving beyond BIM Level 2 to full lifecycle BIM including operate and maintain.

A coordinated digital transformation landscape is required to achieve this digital transformation strategy for economic transformation. He sees the many organization in the UK infrastructure and construction sector coalescing around ICG, representing Highways England, Network Rail, Crossrail, Highspeed Rail 2 (HS2), Heathrow Airport and others and Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) representing the UK BIM Alliance and others to enable this to happen.  The Centre for Digital Built Britain is a partnership between the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and the University of Cambridge to deliver a smart digital economy for infrastructure and construction for the future and transform the UK construction industry’s approach to the way the UK plans, builds, maintains and uses its social and economic infrastructure.

Low cost sensor enables citizen scientists to measure and share urban air pollution data over the web

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than seven million deaths every year are linked to air pollution exposure from household and ambient (outdoor) air pollution. But in spite of these statistics the average city has only one or two air quality monitoring devices which are very expensive costing about $1.5 million each. At this year's FOSS4GNA (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial North America) get together in St Louis Steve Liang, a professor at the University of Calagary and CEO of SensorUp, described a way that citizen scientists can contribute to measuring air pollution using a low cost board and CPU and share via open source geospatial web software to map the resulting measured air pollution in real time.

Based on the latest results from WHO air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk, linked to 12% of all global deaths. Around 4.3 million deaths every year are attributed to exposure to household (indoor) air pollution, from heating, cooking and lighting using solid fuels. Around 3.7 million deaths every year are linked to outdoor air pollution , including exposure to fine particulate matter from fuel combustion from vehicles and from power plants, industry and biomass burning.

Steve described the sensors, which are typically built by interested people in workshops led by staff from SensorUp, a startup that Steve leads. The devices consist of a sensor that measures PM2.5 (particles less than 2.5 microns in size), temperature and humidity, a CPU and Wifi. Each device costs less than $100. After building the device, each participant in the workshop brings it home and installs it outside within wifi range of their internet router. The sensor reports ambient PM2.5, temperature and humidity every 5 minutes to a central server maintained by SensorUp. It uses the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard SensorThings API which provides an open and unified way to interconnect Internet of Things (IoT) devices, data, and applications over the Web. SensorUp SensorThings platform is the most advanced OGC SensorThings API implementation.

A web application built on the open source geospatial software Leaflet allows users to view the data on a map in real time, investigate air pollution historically and compare different cities. The data is open and accessible to anyone.  To date about 500 people across Canada have built their own devices and are sharing measured PM2.5. The real-time feed from these devices is mapped here.

An open distributed architecture for the smart grid based on seamless interoperability

At DistribuTECH 2015, Raiford Smith of CPS Energy and Jason P. Handley of Duke Energy, presented their perspectives on the smart grid; what is motivating it in terms of business and technology drivers, a roadmap for implementing it at their utilities, and the benefits that are expected from it for customers and for utilities.  They also outlined a smart grid architecture based on open standards to enable seamless interoperability that enables distributed as opposed to centralized intelligence.  Some of the advantages of a distributed architecture are scalability, reduced latency and implementing security at the grid edge instead of via the central control application.

Megatrends driving smart grid

Raiford Smith sees four major megatrends that are major motivating forces behind the smart grid.  Moore's Law means there are intelligent devices for power networks with greater capabilities and at less cost.  Metcalfe's Law means more interconnections and greater interoperability.  Big data analytics means the ability to extract more meaningful information and insights from rapidly increasing volumes of data coming from thousands and even millions of intelligent devices.  Distributed energy generation (DER) means more complicated power management - balancing intermittent generation and new load profiles from an increasing number of new electronic devices. 

From a business perspective a major benefit is greater customer choice.  In the future the customer will be able to not only manage his/her consumption of power, but also its generation. With rooftop solar PV and batteries the customer may elect to not even be on the grid, but to create his/her own microgrid.   But it also means the utility business model will have to evolve from what it has been for the past 100 years.  New York is one of the jurisdictions that is already changing its regulatory framework to enable utilities to move to a new business model.

Microgrids

As an aside, at this year's DistribuTECH if there was one technology that seemed to be everywhere and on almost every utility's radar, it is microgrids.  Duke Energy is even playing with the idea of offering  microgrids as a service.

Technology roadmap for the smart grid

From Raiford Smith's perspective the technology roadmap for the smart grid involves the deployment of increasing numbers of intelligent electronic devices for sensing and for control.  The challenge is federating the data from all of these devices, extracting information from it, and dispatching the information to the right control devices.  From an architectural perspective this drives the need for a field message bus which enables interoperability between different devices from different vendors.  It also requires a common semantic model, such as the Common Information Model (CIM), adding security at the edge of the grid in addition to the central control room, and analytics to extract information from the huge volume of data collected from the sensors.

To test different smart grid configurations, CPS Energy is assembling a test facility for a three year smart grid testing program.  It will have 30,000 customers, 15 circuits, solar generation, smart inverters, battery storage and the ability to disconnect from the grid to form a microgrid.

Benefits of the smart grid

Raiford expects major benefits for customers and for the utility from implementing a smart grid.  For customers, perhaps the biggest benefit is that the smart grid avoids divergence of utility services and customers needs.  Sometimes referred to as disaggregation, in this context it means a 3rd party coming between a utility and its customers. Historical examples are Microsoft Hohm and Google Powermeter which were perceived as threats because utilities found the idea of a Microsoft or Google insinuating itself between the utility and its customers unattractive. Opower is an example of a different approach that is much more attractive to utilities.  Instead of doing an end-run around the utility,  Opower focussed on the utility as their direct customer.  Services using Opower's solutions is then offered by the utility to its customers.

Secondly, smart grid provides a flexible foundation for providing new services to customers (which also creates new sources of revenue for utilities).  Raiford suggested some examples including electric vehicles and charging, premium (high quality) power, premium reliability, and asset control (for ex, inverters and batteries) and advanced demand response (the utility would provide these as a service to customers, rather than customers buying these devices from a 3rd party). The result is greater customer satisfaction and improved brand recognition as CPS Energy is perceived as a leader in providing new and improved services to customers.

The benefits that Raiford sees for utilities are equally important.  They include improved operational metrics (SAIDI, SAIFI, asset utilization), better financial metrics (O&M spend, revenue generation), environmental benefits, improved safety, better trained and skilled staff, and more reliable risk modeling (better predictions of revenue, costs, customer satisfaction, and asset condition).

Probably the greatest challenge Raiford sees is managing organizational change, because the smart grid will mean that just about everything will change including the utility business model and most aspects of how we design, build, maintain and operate the grid. 

Drivers for utility industry change

Jason Handley, of the Emerging Technology Office at Duke Energy, reviewed some of the major drivers for industry change.  Many applications currently used by power utilities are proprietary, with the result that the utility has many application silos that don't interoperate.  The rapid adoption of DERs is requiring utilities to move toward faster response times, reduced costs, better safety, and improved reliability.  Dynamic load management and low voltage power electronics will mean greater adoption of rooftop PVs and other DERs.  Increasingly utilities will invest in standards-based, modular systems for hardware, multi-function devices, and a field message bus for software that will enable interoperability.  From a business perspective broader interoperability facilitates more competition which lowers costs, encourages innovation and improves reliability.

Other important drivers that Jason sees that are impacting utilities include demand response, electric vehicles, in-premise automation, cybersecurity threats, aging infrastructure, big data complexity, and avoiding stranded assets.  The smart grid is requiring utilities to change how they do things.  Utilities realize they have to be  more proactive in their operations, rather than waiting for something to happen and then reacting to it.  Situational awareness has become a critical capability for utilities in enabling utilities to be more proactive.  It is made possible by having a variety of sensors in the field that together can present a snapshot of the status of the grid.  The key functionality required to enable this to happen is seamless interoperability.

Centralized or distributed intelligence

As utilities implement thousands and even millions of smart devices in the field, a centralized architecture runs into scalability and latency problems.  Duke's solution is an architecture with distributed as opposed to centralized intelligence.  Duke sees this as comprised of layers so that with this architecture, not all data needs to go to the central control application.  Some can be handled at lower levels.  A self healing network is an example where a problem can be handled locally without the central control application knowing anything about it.  Distributed intelligence also enables fast edge decisions that can be made without waiting for the central control application.  For example, an advantage that cannot be underestimated with this architecture is that it enables security at the edge of the grid, not just via the central control application.  Based on this concept Duke has defined a Distributed Intelligence Platform (DIP) Reference Architecture designed to take advantage of the tremendous intelligence that is out in the field in addition to the intelligence in the control centre.

Duke Energy, CPS Energy and 25 vendors, called the Coalition of the Willing (COW) have just embarked on an implementation of this architecture that supports a microgrid.  The smart grid requires exchanging data between different devices from different manufacturers in the field.  Traditional utility technologies are very often vendor silos utilizing proprietary hardware, telecommunications and software platforms.  The goal of the “Coalition of the Willing" (COW) is to demonstrate that data  and control commands can be shared across multiple vendor platforms (typically proprietary) to achieve interoperability with lower costs and faster response times.  A key part of the demonstration is an open standard field message bus implemented as an open source project.  The Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) has created an OpenFMB working group to support this effort.

SGIP announces OpenFMB project for open standards-based interoperability platform for utilities

At DistribuTECH 2015 the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) has announced the launch of the OpenFMB Project, a special SGIP working group designed to leverage existing standards and structured processes to create a new paradigm for true interoperability and peer-to-peer communication across vendors' architecture that will increase business intelligence and operational efficiencies while allowing for secure and reliable communication and fast decision-making in the field.

The smart grid requires exchanging data between different devices from different manufacturers in the field.  Traditional utility technologies are very often vendor silos utilizing proprietary hardware, telecommunications and software platforms.  Duke Energy and six vendor companies formed a group called the “Coalition of the Willing” (COW) whose goal was to demonstrate that data  and control commands can be shared across multiple vendor platforms (typically proprietary) to achieve interoperability with lower costs and faster response times.  A key part of the demonstration was an open field message bus implemented as an open source project.

Duke Energy has announced the next phase of their interoperability project (COW II) with an expanded group of 25 vendor partners and a utility partner CPS Energy. The second phase will include the operation of a microgrid system which will integrate distributed renewable resources such as solar PV and battery storage with a field message bus-based distributed intelligence platform with wireless communications to devices. 

For COW II Duke Energy defined a Distributed Intelligence Platform (DIP) Reference Architecture.  According to Duke, the reference architecture is intended to document Duke Energy’s technology roadmap for interoperability using open standards-based distributed information systems.  Part of the reference architecture is a field message bus.  According to Duke the Field Message Bus (FMB) is intended to be an open standard-based, common logical publish/ subscribe interface that connects multiple disparate grid devices, telecom networks, and information systems. It is the key technology enabler to demonstrate the benefits of the distributed architecture by facilitating interoperability between multiple different vendor’s OT, IT, and telecom systems.

Starting with the  Distributed Intelligence Platform reference architecture from the COW project, SGIP has defined the OpenFMB concept as the way distributed applications and open interfaces can enable interoperable peer-to-peer data exchanges between power systems devices. The OpenFMB framework provides a specification for power systems field devices to leverage a non-proprietary and standards-based reference architecture platform, which consists of internet protocol (IP) networking, Internet of Things (IoT) messaging protocols, and standardized common semantic models (such as CIM), to enable  communications and peer-to-peer information exchange between devices on the electric grid.

Predictions of the future of the utility business 2015-2018

For the first time in a hundred years, the electric power utility industry is undergoing a momentous change. Distributed renewable power generation, especially solar photovoltaics (PV), is introducing competition into an industry that has been managed as regulated monopolies. Consumers with solar PV panels on their roofs are fundamentally changing the traditional utility business model. A recent report from the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) report refers to disruptive challenges that threaten to force electric power utilities to change or adapt the business model that has been in place since the first half of the 20th century.

Most utilities are in the midst of deploying smart grids, which basically amounts to applying the internet to the electric power grid to link intelligent electronic devices, sensors and grid control applications to enable data-driven decision making.  One of the most important changes driven by the implementation of smart grid is the much greater importance of location. Geospatial technology (location, geospatial data management and spatial analytics) is seen as foundational techology for the smart grid.

The other major global change in energy is the shift in energy demand from the world's advanced economies to emerging economies.   Energy demand from OECD countries has hit a plateau.  Currently China is driving world energy demand. The International Energy Agency's (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2014 projects that in the future  as demand slows from China, world energy demand will be driven by India, the Middle East, and Africa and Latin America.

Recently IDC Energy Insights released a report IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Utilities 2015 Predictions with predictions for the future of the utility business.  Some of these are startling, suggesting that the utility industry is going to experience fundamental changes in how they do business over the next few years.

New business models

IDC predicts that utilities will be looking less at generation as a source of revenue.  IDC predicts that by 2018 45% of new data traffic in utilities' control systems will originate from distributed energy resources that are not owned by the utility.

To make up for this loss of generation revenue IDC predicts that utilities will be looking for new business opportunities such as services.  Specifically, IDC predicts that utilities will derive at least 40% of their earnings from new business models by 2017.

Technology

• Cloud - By 2018 cloud services will make up half of the IT portfolio for over 60% of utilities.
• Integration - In 2015 utilities will invest over a quarter of their IT budgets on integrating new technologies with legacy enterprise systems.
• Analytics - By 2017 45% of utilities' new investment in analytics will be used in operations and maintenance of plant and network infrastructure.
• Mobility - 60% of utilities will focus on transitioning enterprise mobility to capitalize on the consumer mobility wave.
• Smart systems - By 2018 cognitive systems will penetrate utilities' customer operation to improve service and reduce costs.

Some  of the important drivers for these trends include the global redistribution of energy demand from the world's advanced to the emerging economies, the rapid emergence of cloud-based provisioning and services, increasing regulatory pressure responding to customer demand to improve energy market transparency and competitiveness, cross-industry competition for technical, especially IT skills, smart analytics, and virtual and augmented reality beginning to be applied in business.

Top 10 technology trends

In March 2014 Gartner, Inc. identified the top ten technology trends which it saw impacting the global energy and utility markets.  There is considerable overlap between IDC's business predictions and the technology trends identified by Gartner, Inc.

Social Media

Social media are beginning to be used as a customer acquisition and retention medium, as a consumer engagement channel to drive customer participation in energy efficiency programs, a source of information about outages, and as the emerging area of crowd-sourcing distributed energy resources coordination. Social media are also being used by utilities for communicating information about outages with customers.

Big Data

Smart grid will increase the quantity of data that utilities have to manage by a factor of about 10,000 according to a recent estimate.  This trend is driven by intelligent devices, sensors, social networks, and new IT and OT applications such as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), synchrophasors, smart appliances, microgrids, advanced distribution management, remote asset monitoring, and self-healing networks.  The type of data that utilities will need to manage will change: for example, real-time data from sensors and intelligent devices including smart phones and unstructured data from social networks will play a much greater role for utilities in the future.

Mobile and Location-Aware Technology

Mobile and location-aware technology which includes hardware (laptops and smartphones), communication products (GPS-based navigation, routing and tracking technologies), social networks (Twitter,Facebook and others) and services (WiFi, satellites, and packet switched networks) are transforming all industries.  Utilities for the most part have been slow to adopt consumer mobile technology, but  this is changing.

Cloud Computing

Acccording to Gartner, areas such as smart meter, big data analytics, demand response coordination and GIS are driving utilities to adopt cloud-based solutions.  Early adopters of cloud technologies include small utilities with limited in-house IT skills and budgets, organizations which provide application and data services to multiple utilities, such as cooperative associations and transmission system operators,  and investor-owned utilities (IoUs) conducting short-term smart grid pilots.

Sensor Technology

Sensors, which are being applied extensively throughout the entire supply, transmission and distribution domains of utilities, provide a stream of real-time information from which a real-time state of the grid can be derived.

IT and OT Convergence

Virtually all new technology projects in utilities will require a combination of IT and OT investment and planning, such as AMI or advanced distribution management systems (ADMSs).  This will be a challenge for many utilities, especially smaller ones, which don't have in-house IT skills.

Advanced Metering Infrastructure

AMI provides a communication backbone aimed at improving distribution asset utilization and facilitating consumer inclusion in energy markets.

Internet of Things

Sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects are linked through wired and wireless networks, using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet.  When intelligent objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding utility grids and responding to changes in near real-time.  Following McKinsey there are two key benefits arising from the Internet of Things for utilities

• Enhanced situational awareness - acheiving real-time awareness of physical environment, in this case, the grid
• Sensor-driven decision analytics - assisting human decision making through deep analysis and data visualization

Asset performance management

Traditional asset management approaches are too limiting for today’s performance-based, data-driven utility environment. Asset performance management solutions need to deliver real-time equipment performance, reliability, maintenance and decision support for effective resource management so that operations and maintenance teams are empowered with real-time decision support information, providing the right information to the right people at the right time and in the right context.  The result is improved operational performance and better asset availability and utilization.

Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics

Analytics will become essential as the volume of data generated by intelligent devices and sensors, mobile devices (the Internet of Things) and social media increases and huge pools of structured and unstructured data need to be analyzed to extract actionable information.  Analytics will become embedded everywhere, often invisibly.

W3C and Open Geospatial Consortium announce new collaboration

The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.  This includes Web access from mobile phones and other mobile devices as well as the use of Web technology connecting intelligent devices in consumer electronics, printers, broadcasting, automobiles, and utility and transportation networks, to name just a few - what is becoming collectively known as the Internet of Things (IoT).

Everything has location.  In the context of the Internet of Things it is increasingly being realized that location is vital to the emerging field of connected devices.   To improve interoperability and integration of spatial data on the Web the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are announcing today a new collaboration which is intended to make the geospatial a fundamental component of the Web.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of over 500 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web.

There is a gap between the specialized world of geographic data and that of the Web.  Bridging GIS systems and the Web will create a network effect that enriches both worlds.  At a March 2014 Workshop on Linking Geospatial Data, co-organized by OGC and W3C and in partnership with the UK Government Linked Data Working Group, Google, and the Ordnance Survey, participants discussed the challenges of integrating geospatial data and technology into the web.  Based on the challenges identified in that Workshop, the collaboration announced today will enable publishers of spatial data, providers of services that consume the data, and application developers to establish common practices and reduce the cost of integrating spatial data on the Web. The Geospatial and Web communities will document use cases and requirements with the goal of developing best practices for publishing spatial data on the Web.  The collaboration is also expected to result in new W3C Recommendations and OGC standards.

Balancing electricity demand and intermittent renewable generation

Over the past decade,distributed generation, especially solar photovoltaic (PV),  consumer demand response programs, and other flexible distributed resources of electric power has grown dramatically.  Until now, with a few exceptions such as Germany and Hawaii, distributed intermittent resources have represented a relatively small proportion of total power generation.  However, as we face the prospect of scaling the use of flexible distributed energy resources including affordable energy storage batteries, attention is focussing in many jurisdictions not only on the economics of distributed energy, but also on the control system that will balance intermittent micro-generation resources and consumer demand and the rapid evolution of new consumer devices, aka the Internet of Things.

Renewable energy sources like solar and wind power are being used more and more worldwide, while the market share of conventional power stations is decreasing. Wind and solar are intermittent sources of power and balancing these power sources and consumer demand becomes a serious challenge when intermittent  represent more than about 20% of total demand.  For example, distributed generation with many small sources of power feeding energy at medium and low voltage levels can reverse the load flows from lower to higher voltage levels.

All of these changes affect the provision of system services which balance supply and demand. For example, conventional power stations not only provide most of the balancing energy required in the system, but the inertia of their generators also guarantees the provision of instantaneous reserves for immediate frequency support. Other important system services include voltage maintenance, operation management and re-establishment of power supply.

Germany's Energiewende

The decision to shutdown its nuclear power plants in favour of renewable energy (and increased use of coal) is fundamentally changing the supply of energy in Germany.  According to Fraunhofer ISE in the first half of 2014 solar and wind power plants together produced more than 45 TWh or approximately 17% of Germany's net electricity generation. All renewable energy sources including hydro and biomass produced a total of about 81 TWh and accounted for approximately 31% of German net electricity production.

For example, the Unterfränkische Überlandzentrale eG (ÜZ) in Lülsfeld is a medium sized utility company in Northern Bavaria. It operates a typical regional distribution network in Germany - a large area with many small towns and villages and plenty of space for renewable plants. In 2013 its total electricity demand was 497 million kWh of which renewables had a share of more than 285 million kWh which is more than 50% of electricity demand.

To address the challenge of balancing generation and demand with increasing intermittent energy sources distributed over larger areas, the Deutsche Energie-Agentur GmbH (dena) - the German Energy Agency - commissioned a study to determine the scope of grid system services in the context of an increasing supply of intermittent energy.  The dena Distribution Grid Study is a detailed examination of the need for expansion and conversion in the German electricity distribution grids based on two alternative expansion scenarios for renewable energy sources. The results document a significant need for expansion by 2030. It also analyses technical options for reducing grid expansion requirements.  It found that the use of innovative grid operational resources, the adaptation of technical guidelines and down-regulation of generation peaks of decentralised generation systems could reduce the need for grid expansion.

Sacramento Municipal Utility District

In Sacramento, California, some neighborhoods already generate much more power than they use and send power back onto the grid. Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) engineers had thought this would cause problems in balancing load with generation and raise the risk of damaging equipment. But so far that hasn't happened.  SMUD has a working group on solar issues that is looking at system enhancements that might be necessary to handle more local solar on the system in the future. Estimates  of SMUD's solar potential are that it could potentially produce around 1,400 MW. SMUD experiences a minimum load of 800 to 900 MW and a peak load around 3,300 MW. SMUD engineers expect that there is an "optimal" amount of solar power to have on the system that is probably less than the maximum that is technically feasible.  In addition utilities have to make provision for what happens when the sun doesn't shine during peak load periods.  To provide backup power, building so-called gas-fired peaking plants are expensive because they typically are idle most of the time. 

Changing the utility price structure for rooftop solar PV power

One way of addressing the balancing issue is to change the price structure that a utility uses to pay for solar power generated by its customers.  The Salt River Project (SRP) has about about 9000 solar customers representing about 800 MW of rooftop solar PV capacity.   Mark Bonsall has pointed out that in the traditional utility model, comparing variable and fixed costs with fixed and variable revenue shows there is a mismatch, which translates into a revenue shortfall or unrecovered cost when comparing a non-solar customer's with a solar customer's annual bill.  From Mark Bonsall's perspective, the problem is not technology, it is the price structure, which he feels has to change.

A graph of the PV power output from 800 of SRP's solar customers shows that the peak output varied from 11 am for some customers to 4 pm for others.  SRP's demand peak is around 6 pm, when everyone goes home from work and turns on their air conditioners.  Mark Bonsall suggested that SRP's price structure should encourage solar customers whose PV output peaks closer to SRP's demand peak.  This means a price structure based on demand (kW) not just energy (kWh), which is a different business model from that used by utilities today.

Energy storage

The renewable + energy storage market is getting interesting and has been forecasted to grow to $2.8 billion in 2018.  Solar City offers a small scale residential and commercial solar+battery system which uses Tesla batteries and Tesla has just announced a $5 billion battery factory to be completed by 2017.

The development of combined solar PV and batteries from Tesla and others promises to make solar + storage accessible for increasing numbers of consumers.  With storage solar consumers could form their own microgrid, either by themselves or with their neighbours and disconnect from the grid.  Alternatively they could become a source of dispatchable power and become an energy provider.  Increasingly they could find that either of these options is economically advantageous.  This has serious implications for local utilities because if this trend develops it could seriously erode the traditional utility revenue base.   It could also lead to a completely decentralized grid comprised of many microgrids.  From an operations perspective it increases the complexity of managing the grid compared to the centralized model in use today.

Urban planning working group announced by the Open Geospatial Consortium

An Urban Planning Domain Working Group (DWG) has been chartered to define the role for Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards within the urban planning discipline.  The DWG offers an open forum for the discussion and presentation of interoperability requirements, use cases, and implementations of OGC standards relevant to urban planning. 

Technologies and trends such as smart cities, smart grids, sensor webs, the Internet of Things (IoT), facilities and asset management, indoor and outdoor navigation, energy performance modeling and real-time, “big data” analytics are important for urban planners.  In these technology domains, open standards encourage the sharing of information. The OGC Urban Planning Domain Working Group intends to discover requirements for open spatial standards in information systems involved in the planning, design, use, maintenance and governance of publicly accessible spaces. Requirements identified by OGC Domain Working Groups are typically used as the basis for standards development by chartered OGC Standards Working Groups (SWGs).

Image: Sunshine Ecomap