One of the things that has struck me after a number of years travelling and visiting utilities and telecoms world wide is the similarity of the process used to design and manage utility and telecommunications networks, not only across different geographies but across different sectors, power, water, waste water, gas, cable, and telecom. The basic process for designing and managing a network is essentially the same the world over. So we are seeing the same problems the world over.
Utilities and telecommunications companies are facing the same global challenges that other sectors such as construction are, global climate change which is forcing utilities to reduce carbon emissions, aging infrastructure, an aging and shrinking workforce which is motivating efforts to improve productivity, and perhaps most importantly in the last two or three years the transformation of the electric power grid to a modern smart grid, or perhaps more accurately, a smarter grid.
My top six challenges that the smart grid are bringing to a head are
1. Improving Design Productivity
Design productivity has become critical as a result of the aging and shrinking workforce which means that organizations need to do more with less. Organizations are losing experienced designers to retirement faster than they can replace them with younger inexperienced workers. This means that they are not only facing reduced headcount, but also fewer experienced workers..
2. Improving flow of design information between field staff and the records department
The field staff are often frustrated by the poor quality of the facilities maps they receive with their work orders. They are also frustrated by business processes that more often than not discourage field workers from providing valuable information back to records about inaccuracies they observe in the field or about changes they have made.
3. Resolving the as-built problem
One of the major challenges in utilities and telecoms face is the “as-built” problem. A symptom of this problem that can be found in utilities and telecoms is an as-built backlog, comprised of as-builts returned from construction that are waiting to be entered into the records database. These backlogs, which can stretch from several months to years, mean that the records database is always out-of-date making it difficult to provide reliable information about network facilities to the field, management, and the regulator.
4. Eliminating redundant data
Another problem is data redundancy. A well-known Gartner study found that the same pole data was being maintained independently by nine different groups in the same utility.
5. Improving the quality of the facilities database
There are several dimensions to the data quality issue including geolocation, connectivity (what is connected to what and phase), current state of the equipment, maintenance history, and financial records. Poor data quality has serious implications for the organization such as unreliable reports prepared for management and for regulators, which can lead to massive fines such as though seen in the water industry in the UK, negative impacts on the productivity of field staff with the concomitant impact on the bottom line, lengthening the time required to respond to outages, and inhibiting the rapid deployment of new services because the design data critical for servicability calculations used to customer access to services such as broadband, cable, or power is either not available or unreliable. Some telcos, for example, found that the quality of their databases was so poor that they had to send crews to the field to recapture the facilities data that is critical for determining broadband serviceability.
A directly related example of the geolocation aspect of this problem is our lack of reliable information about the geoocation of underground infrastructure, which is estimated to cost the economy billions.
6. Reducing paper flow
One of the things that leap out of diagrams of the flow of engineering design data in utilities and telecoms like the one I have included is the problem of islands of technology (CAD, GIS, ...) connected by paper-based information flows. For example, in many organizations the as-built problem is the direct result of paper flow, paper as-builts coming back from construction are redigitized into the records database. Organizations in all sectors are looking to reduce the flow of paper, not only as part of a green initiative to save trees, but also because paper flows result in data and process redundancy, inhibit productivity, and impair the agility of the organization. Organizations have looked at what has happened in the banking industry, airline industry, and web-based retail, and can see the benefits of reducing paper-based information flows.
Brazil's electricity regulator mandates geospatial data quality
- Requires utilities to supply precise geographic information about the location of cables, transformers and customer metering points. This will improve asset management in a number of ways, one of which is to reduce the duration of outages by being able to locate and repair or replace failed equipment faster.
This effort to improve the quality of geolocation information about electric power facilities is not new. It has been underway in Brazil for some time. I blogged about it in 2009. At that time ANEEL had promulgated guidelines that required power utility facilities database to achieve 95% (at least that is what I heard) accuracy by 2010. In Brazil this has been a compelling event that motivated power utilities to invest in technology to optimize business processes for data quality in order to achieve the goal of a reliable representation of their distribution network. This regulation put Brazil in a position to have one of the most reliable digital models of its network infrastructure in the world. It also provides what ANEEL sees as a prerequisite for the Brazilian smart grid.
EPRI's GIS Interest Group focus on accurately representating the power distribution system
So I was very happy to see that the focus of the Electric Power Research Institute's (EPRI) Geospatial Information System (GIS) Interest Group is data quality, specifically relating to the geolocation of grid facilities, a topic which has gotten a lot of attention on this blog over the years. It is intended to be a forum for utilities to explore methods of improving GIS data quality by sharing with each other and participating in EPRI sponsored research. With the advent of AMI, DMS, and the Smart Grid, distribution companies can no longer ignore poor data quality. EPRI has found that in many cases, utilities are finding that their capital intensive smart grid investments are not yielding anticipated benefits simply because the utility does not have an adequately accurate representation of the distribution system. EPRI goes on to say that in more extreme cases, the safety of employees and the public has been compromised due to misrepresented facilities in the GIS.
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) conducts research relating to the generation, delivery and use of electric power. It has over a 1000 members worldwide, primarily electric power utilities but also vendors, government organizations, and others. EPRI supports a number of special focus groups including Metering and AMI, Smart Grid EA, and others.
From EPRI's perspective, GIS quality issues are primarily related to:
- Gaps - key data is missing
- Data redundancies - the same data is captured and maintained in many systems
- Out of date “as-builts” - untimely work order completion / backlog
- Inaccuracies with the field - the GIS has data but it is so reliable, that the field staff don't use it
- Unreliable land-base - varying degrees of accuracy of land-base data
- Connectivity - transformer to customer phase is unknown or unreliable
- Data model - GIS model itself allows for “bad” data.
I couldn't agree more. This overlaps with most of my 6 points. I am very optimistic that this issue, the problem of creating and maintaining an accurate representation of the distribution system, is finally going to get the attention it deserves - under the impetus of the smart grid transformation.