Mapping the Road Ahead

GIS tools have become an invaluable asset for the utility industry, enabling organizations to meet the demands of some of the most demanding customers around. There is no room for error in the energy industry, with customers expecting their power supply to be uninterrupted and easily fixable should anything go wrong.

GIS technology can have a number of uses, and enables utilities to meet their engineering, design, maintenance and construction needs. “Nearly everything a utility does involves location,” highlights Bill Meehan, Director of Utility Solutions at ESRI. “GIS is not just a mapping tool, but helps utilities make tough decisions, like how to respond to an emergency or which assets to maintain and which to replace – most of these decisions require spatial analysis. What makes GIS so powerful for utilities is the ability to visualize critical relationships for effective decision making, for ease of communication and for coloration among the various groups, like engineering, design, construction and maintenance. Seeing gas leaks on a map is interesting. Yet seeing gas leaks in relationship to load profiles or electrical manholes or in areas of major development provide insights that could not be possible without GIS.”

Using GIS software, utilities can collect valuable data about their company. “It allows utilities to author detailed information about their company, their fixed assets, their people, their property and their resources,” says Meehan. “This information can then be served throughout the enterprise, mashed up with other pieces of information (like real-time data or live image feeds or information from external data sources), then used throughout the utility on desktops, on mobile devices or served through the company’s internet.”

An example of a utility that has successfully deployed the technology is Laurens Electric Company, a non-profit, member-owned electric distribution utility located in upstate South Carolina. In 2001, the company decided to replace its CAD-based system with GIS in order to meet a number of goals. At the time, the company was keen to replace paper-based map books and improve field data collection with GIS in order to achieve cost and time reductions, improve accuracy, reduce dispatch radio traffic and make accessing data easier while in the field. The company deployed ESRI’s ArcPad to help alleviate some of these problems and as a result are able to view their entire service area while in the field, utilize the most up-to-date and accurate service data available, and upload data to the enterprise GIS architecture once back in the office. Problems such as dispatch radio traffic have been reduced.

As utilities modernize their systems to deal with future electric demands, Meehan explains the potential of the technology. “Electric utilities are old and many have been around for well over a century,” he explains. “They were one of the earliest users of computers. As such, they have aging infrastructure, aging individuals, aging information technology. GIS can help utilities make the right decisions about how to manage their assets and their people. The right GIS technology can integrate with legacy systems and in fact add value to those systems until the right time comes to replace them. For example, one utility customer has an older mainframe trouble call system. It is all text-based. Exporting their customer outage data to their ArcGIS platform extends the life of the trouble call system and provides significant added value for the utility and the customers they serve.”

The unfortunate reality is that often utilities simply cannot afford to upgrade all of their older facilities at once, and one of the reasons they use GIS is to help them see patterns of issues so they can replace or reinforce those facilities most in need. The alarmingly high proportion of workers nearing retirement age is also likely to have an impact on the future development of the electric industry, bringing with it a loss of experience and skills that will be hard to replace. As a result, GIS technologies are likely to become even more attractive to utilities in the future.

“Even today, many utility decisions are made from information only contained in employee’s memories,” says Meehan. “GIS helps transfer those insights into meaningful digital form. In addition, GIS will be an essential tool to optimize the delivery system. It is an essential tool for power supply siting, from large nuclear plants to distributed wind and solar farms; from geothermal to figuring where to pipe C02 from coal plants to underground sequestering sites. GIS is designed to help planners assess an enormous number of spatial factors for optimal siting. Electric transmission will need to expand significantly, and finding new routes will be difficult – GIS will help.”