Project Highlights:
- CORE Electric Cooperative
- Headquartered in Sedalia, CO
- 5,000 sq mi service area / 7 geographic districts
- 175,000+ members along Colorado’s Front Range
Following the finalization of its Advanced Distribution Model System (ADMS) and Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) roadmap, CORE Electric Cooperative (CORE) moved forward in its journey to modern grid management by preparing the organization for migration to Esri’s Next Generation Network Management with ArcGIS. The move is supporting the cooperative’s business transformation to an operational ADMS by requiring more consistent and complete electric data ahead of implementation.
CORE has concluded a readiness assessment with UDC to determine the effort required to migrate its existing electric distribution data from Esri’s ArcMap/Schneider Electric’s ArcFM Electric Model to ArcGIS Pro and the ArcGIS Utility Network data model. The assessment also provided the cooperative with a better understanding of the hardware requirements for making the move. Helping to calibrate the level of preparation needed by CORE, the initiative evaluated the utility’s system architecture and infrastructure, assessed the legacy data’s fit for the new model, and performed a test migration of all existing electric distribution data to the ArcGIS Utility Network data model using UDC’s HEIDE data migration tool hosted in an AWS cloud environment.
Data Assessment Goals
Standardizing its data on Network Management will assist CORE with taking full advantage of the planned ADMS’s advanced functionality and high-value applications with each release. CORE is planning to deploy its advanced applications for ADMS in a phased approach of four business releases. Apart from ADMS, the investment in Network Management provides support for CORE’s other enterprise systems, helping improve efficiencies around reliability engineering, analyses, and asset, workflow, and customer management.
The UN data assessment effort backs CORE’s larger vision for grid modernization by creating a connected electrical distribution model to serve as the infrastructure for the cooperative’s future ADMS. Similar to the ArcGIS Utility Network model, ADMS requires a higher level of asset detail and accuracy than most legacy systems. The real-world modeling constructs of the ArcGIS Utility Network data model allow CORE to easily collect, manage, and address the data requirements needed to drive the ADMS and its applications and power system models.
Key ArcGIS Utility Network data modeling constructs that support the modern power grid model build and management needs of an ADMS include:
- Structural, connectivity rules and containment associations supporting:
- Substation connectivity
- Switchgear connectivity
- Terminal configurations and subnetwork tiers supporting modern grid topologies:
- Bi-directional energy flow
- Native support for secondary meshes, underground residential distribution (URD) loops, spot networks, and distributed energy resources (DERs) installed anywhere along a circuit
- Network attributes (cost, descriptors):
- Cached to support tracing performance
- Easy to manage with propagation
- Network Diagrams for modeling schematics:
- Generated and editable schematics based on subnetwork
- Sent to ADMS for operators to use for switching
- Allows the Enterprise GIS to display the ADMS generated information to both internal and external stakeholders
Migrating to Network Management ahead of the planned ADMS implementation therefore enables CORE to build its ADMS power system models with the required high-fidelity data.
Assessing Migration Readiness
To evaluate how ready CORE’s electric distribution data and system were for Network Management, UDC first reviewed the legacy documentation, system architecture, and infrastructure to get a fuller understanding of CORE’s technology baseline. UDC then utilized its auto-migration HEIDE tool to perform two different analyses on CORE’s existing geometries and attributes – a source data analysis and ArcGIS Utility Network data analysis. The latter assessed CORE’s data for compliance with the model’s detailed requirements and provided insights into how CORE’s data would realistically function in the new model.
UDC fully configured a sample data set in the ArcGIS Utility Network data model and used the converted data to walk through documented business process workflows in the new system. From this exercise, CORE gained real-world understanding into how its current workflows would operate using the model and identified opportunities to alter these workflows and reduce their technical expenses of third-party and custom software.
UN Data Assessment Components
The system architecture design phase incorporated input from cloud vendors and CORE’s IT architects and stakeholders throughout the company. This approach ensures a cohesive system design and alignment across the organization while also allowing room for the development of individual solutions to suit different department requirements.
The Esri ArcGIS Utility Network Data Assessment project included:
- Defining key properties of the new GIS platform
- Performing analyses of electric distribution GIS data to determine fit and completeness for a functional ArcGIS Utility Network model
- Configuring a full sample set of electric distribution data to discover how legacy workflows would operate using the new model
- Reviewing and documenting third-party tools and required business system integrations included in full migration and implementation
- Providing a data readiness data mitigation plan for full migration
- Defining training and organizational change management requirements to prepare CORE editors for the new tools and business process workflows
Following the assessment, CORE is continuing with in-house data cleanup initiatives, inventorying its operational devices, and exploring data governance measures to help maintain data accuracy and completeness in the ArcGIS Utility Network data model.
Migration to Network Management serves as a steppingstone to CORE’s ultimate goals of improving the efficiency and resiliency of its electrical distribution grid by helping the cooperative ready its electric data for a fully operational ADMS. To learn more about the first phase of CORE’s grid modernization journey, see The Modern Grid Management Journey at CORE Electric Cooperative. Hear about the journey from CORE’s perspective in our UDC Conversation and joint Energy Central PowerTalk.