As the Smart Grid matures and consumers become even more reliant on uninterrupted service to power their daily lives, utility operations are progressively shifting their focus to the power of data analytics to increase reliability and customer satisfaction. In their article, How Utilities Are Deploying Data Analytics Now, global financial energy consultants, Bain & Company, concentrate on leveraging the wealth of data generated by utilities for greater cost reduction, reliability, and customer engagement. Bain & Company expands on the analytics opportunities within utilities using a three-tiered approach: basic descriptive systems, moderately complex predictive systems and more advanced prescriptive systems (Figure 1 below) to explain how utilities can begin to build analytic capabilities aligned with their specific goals. The article outlines how one utility was able to improve outage management business processes and provide more accurate estimates of outage duration for their customers using advance analytics to build predictive models. Although the Bain & Company article’s examination of utility analytics describes the process as a “…journey” that “may take years,” we believe it highlights what is possible now for electric utility companies.
Content Overview
Accelerating the Digital Transformation of Utilities
At UDC, we are witnessing the acceleration of the digital transformation of electric and gas utilities by leading-edge technology supporting prescriptive analytic business processes also known as operational business intelligence. Operational business intelligence is the enablement of real-time decisions drawn from the data utilities generate on a daily basis which occurs at the highest prescriptive analytics level. We understand the need for and are assisting utilities to take advantage of data analytics at this level with a framework solution that enables them to mine the wealth of data they are generating from their outage management systems, mobile workforce management systems, their Advanced Meter Infrastructure/meter data management systems, their demand response management systems, SCADA systems, substation automation devices, feeder automation devices, and their advanced distribution management systems. Using UDC’s Digital Utility® – DyAN™, utilities can achieve operational business intelligence much faster than previously expected.
See our blog – Effective DER Management Requires a Holistic Approach to Reliability Analysis Underpinned by GIS and BI Tools for more information.
The Dynamic Operations Dashboard Enables Prescriptive Analytics
By implementing a dynamically updating, visual operations dashboard, utilities are able to advance their journey into the world of data analytics beyond basic descriptive reporting and combine visualization and aggregation power to look at large amounts of data in a top down and intuitive fashion. The need to aggregate the utility’s existing operational systems information on top of their operating area and on top of their facilities for improved operational awareness is supported. Both outage restoration decision makers and customers benefit from an increase in operation effectiveness when provided with uniquely optimized outage management views.
Via interactive mapping displays, real-time visual information output and historic playback, all nine levels of data analytics from the simple descriptive of what is happening and where – to the complex prescriptive of supporting reliability centered maintenance and predicting device failures based on their digital footprints can be realized.
Dynamic Operations Dashboards for Feeder Management
Dynamic operations dashboards for feeder management increase dependability by providing the utility’s reliability engineering staff the tools they need to help review trends based on outage cause codes, device types and manufacturer, feeder loads, and the weather with multiple prescriptive analytic views and capabilities including:
- System Load, System Frequency
- Number feeders at percentage of load
- Ranked set of highest loaded feeders
- Month set of weekly load shapes per feeder
- Total interruptible load by feeder
- System total interruptible load
- Total DG Load by Feeder
- Current year Outage Indices and historic values
- Total Power Quality issues per feeder
- Show customer loads, power factors
- Ability to overlay outage cause codes with PM program statuses
- Ability to show predicted failures at device locations based on their digital footprint
- Audit DG/DER interconnect contracts
- Generate deployment plans for VVO/VCCR field devices
Additional Benefits of Dynamic Operations Dashboards
Identifying Capital Improvements
Providing prescriptive analytic capabilities assists utilities in identifying capital improvement projects. Utilities are able to justify capital improvement recommendations by analyzing the impact their recommendations would have on both historic and predicted outage indices.
Minimizing Fire Risks
A dynamic operations dashboard for feeder management can help in minimizing fire risks. Reliability engineers are able to identify potential locations for installing high-speed disconnects and circuit breakers minimizing fire risks caused by downed power lines.
Future of Condition-based Asset Management
UDC sees dynamic operations dashboards as a vital component of future condition based utility asset management and reliability centered asset management.
Key to UDC’s DyAN™ solution, the Digital Utility® framework is a project accelerator for internal operations dashboards, external customer dashboards, reliability feeder sentinel dashboard, condition based asset management, and reliability centered maintenance dashboards. The enterprise grade, Esri ArcGIS applications GIS based framework allows the utility to easily correlate, visualize, and bring together the information from these systems:
• Outage Management Systems
• OSIsoft® PI System®
• Mobile Work Management
• Advance Distribution Management Systems
• Demand Response Management Systems
• Advance Meter Infrastructure / Meter Data Management Systems
To learn more about the Digital Utility® – DyAN™ and leveraging its data analytics capabilities for your utility, contact us. Download our eBook to learn how you can support and leverage the wealth of your digitally collected information about distribution systems as part of your Smart Grid implementation.