GIS gets smart

Is there a role for GIS technologies in the development of the smart grid concept? Nashville Electric Service’s VP of Operations Paul Allen certainly thinks so.

Few will argue that the smart grid concept is the foundation for a new era of power system management. What many utilities have yet to realize, however, is the critical role geospatial technologies can play in making the smart grid a reality.

Take Tennessee’s Nashville Electric Service, for instance. For over a decade, the energy provider has been steadily integrating GIS systems into its operations, reaping huge benefits in terms of outage management, automated vehicle location and improved reliability. More importantly, it’s now providing a valuable support tool for the utility’s planned smart grid rollout. Paul Allen has been instrumental in bringing GIS applications into the heart of Nashville Electric Service’s enterprise system, and has no doubt that such technologies have improved the company’s operations beyond measure. “The initial thrust of the GIS implementation was to help get our outage management system up and running,” he explains. “And our reliability has improved probably 30-40 percent since we put that system in place. GIS was instrumental in that effort.”

Indeed, Nashville Electric can be considered pioneers in this area. “We started trying to procure an outage system in 1994, and realized that we needed to have GIS to make it work,” continues Allen. “We actually implemented it in 1997, so this has been a long-term project for us.”

Based on the success of this initial rollout, Allen’s team then began to look at other areas of the business that could benefit from the power of geospatial technologies, applying the lessons and techniques learnt from their experience with the outage management system. “Our focus is to try to get GIS into all areas of our business,” he says. “After the outage system was put in place, we added automatic vehicle location to that system. So as we’re working through our day-to-day operations, we know where our trucks are. We’ve got over 700 square miles of territory, so that was very important to us. We’ve also recently started using the GIS for routing some of our service calls and street lighting and things like that. And just about in every piece of our business, we’re looking at GIS to supply some support for that.”

The benefits have been numerous, but none more so than in the improved reliability the new system affords. “The added reliability factor has been a key advantage for us,” Allen confirms. “Having a reliable power system is our primary focus, so that’s been the greatest benefit.” However, he’s keen to point out other advances the system has helped with, too. “We’re seeing benefits in using routing software based on the GIS to move our productivity and reduce our costs right now. We have also recently been doing a lot of work with fiber optic communications networks, and we’ve got a piece of software that uses the GIS as a base to manage that. Rather than having five or 10 employees looking after that, we’ve got just one employee doing the whole management system on GIS. So we’ve seen some improvements in productivity using the GIS as a tool for that.”

A key area in this regard has been the improvements realized in terms of fleet management. The integration of automated vehicle location routing with GIS applications that deliver real-time fleet management data has resulted in significant savings in man-hours and field costs for NES. “We have GPS automatic vehicle location on our primary service trucks, and so we’re able to track those trucks wherever they are in our service territory. We’ve also got some smaller trucks that we use GIS-based technology in – for dispatching those trucks in the field, giving them a suggested routing for handling their service calls, etc.” Previously, Nashville Electric was averaging around two hours turnaround time on a service call. After implementing the new GIS routing system, the utility currently has that figure down to under an hour.

“We’ve had a tremendous savings in this area,” confirms Allen. “But it’s something that has evolved in tandem with advances being made in mobile communication tools and applications, which are really revolutionizing the way field workers are able to operate, and the speed at which they’re able to operate. We’ve got a longer-term vision of getting mobile data to all of our trucks. Not just routing, but having maps and tools in the trucks that are GIS-based and that we can access in the field. It’s pretty expensive. And we’re looking for just the right technology to do that. There are a lot of choices out there, and we want to make sure we get the right one for us.

Of course, GIS is most powerful when you can integrate it into wider IT infrastructures – a fact Allen acknowledges as a key challenge for utilities looking to realize the potential of geospatial technologies. “With our outage system, the very first thing we had to do was integrate GIS with our customer information system,” he explains. “We’re also in the process right now of trying to get our work management system and our GIS integrated more fully. We have a work management system that produces work orders and interfaces through our accounting system, and we’re looking at ways to integrate those two more fully. So if I want to go to the GIS, I can pull up all my work orders in a certain area and look at what type of work I’ve got in that area. It’ll also allow us to see all the costs that we have in a particular area.”

Allen’s aim is to have all of those systems integrated by the end of this year, along with a system to put all of Nashville Electric Service’s street lighting reporting online. “We’re going to be able to map those on our GIS,” he says.

But it is the concept of using GIS as a tool for facilitating the smart grid revolution that really excites him. “I definitely think there is an important role for geospatial technologies in the development of the smart grid – and for me it goes back to this idea of the outage management system. The outage management system is more than just an outage management system; it’s a virtual grid, if you like, that provides a model of our system. So as we put the smart grid devices out there, GIS tells us where they are. We want them to tie into our virtual electric system. We’ve also got an automatic metering infrastructure project underway, and GIS is going to be involved in that too. So it’s a good support tool for any smart grid initiatives. I don’t know if it’ll take the lead in some of the bigger programs, but it’s certainly going be in the background as a great support tool.”

In terms of their own smart grid plans, Allen and his team are currently in the final stages of drawing up a business plan for how to best implement the various technologies involved. Without a mandate to move immediately, Nashville Electric is investing significant resources on ensuring it gets the rollout right. “For us, it’s probably two years off,” admits Allen. “Nevertheless, it’s going be a fairly significant rollout. We’ve got about 340,000 customers, and we think it’s going to impact all of them. Like I said earlier, we’ve got about 700 square miles of service territory, so it’s going to be a pretty good effort once we get moving on it. We have some smart devices in the field already and they’re tied into our outage system, so we know where they are. We have two-way communication to them through our communication network, and they’re on our GIS and our outage system. So we’ve got the basic infrastructure set up. We just need to add devices to it.”

In the long-term, Allen has no doubt that GIS will eventually touch every aspect of the energy business. “As a utility with a wide geographic service area, we’re inevitably going to be looking at geographic-based technologies and putting these at the heart of our operations,” he says. “I think GIS is going to be a great development tool. For instance, we anticipate getting GIS in our customer service operation just as soon as we can afford to get the right kind of computers and displays and everything in place. Our approach is to introduce the technology to various parts of the company in a phased rollout and, as people start to rely on it more and more, then we’ll have the business case for rolling it out to other parts of the organization in different applications. Right now, our customer service people have access to some of our maps. And they’re asking us for the ability to tie customer information to these maps, and to be able to bring them up as and when they need to. And I think that’s the way it’s going to go; we’re probably not going to really need a business case as such. It’s just going to be a need that evolves over time. And we’ll just respond to that need through technology as and when we need to.”