“To deliver safe, reliable and economical electric service to its customers — serving as a role model of what a public power company should be in the 21^st century” is part of the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA; Uniondale, New York, U.S.) mission statement. Our management takes this seriously. In 2004, LIPA was recognized as the most reliable electric utility in New York state in terms of the quickest times for restoration of service, lowest frequency of interruptions and shortest duration of outages.

And, this is happening in a somewhat unique organizational structure where LIPA, established in 1998 by New York state, is operating as a nonprofit entity with the role and the responsibility of an asset owner. All T&D operations are outsourced to KeySpan, now part of National Grid (Westborough, Massachusetts, U.S.), with service agreements of asset manager and service provider limited through 2013.

In the last nine years, LIPA has invested more than US$2.5 billion in system upgrades, improvements and automation. As a primary electric service provider to Long Island, New York, LIPA is the third-largest public power utility in the nation in terms of customers served, with more than 1.1 million customers.

Significant future investment is expected to be in information technology (IT) and infrastructure. LIPA's strategy of investing in IT is influenced by our role as asset owner and model of outsourcing asset management on one side, and our goal of performance excellence on the other side.

IT INFRASTRUCTURE AND DATA

LIPA's specific position of representing the asset owner and managing T&D operation through subcontracting the asset management and service providers reinforces the need for some specific elements in LIPA's policy concerning contractor-provided software. In reality, with all the mergers, integrations and changes in ownership that are happening more frequently than before, most of the aspects of our IT ownership policies are applicable and at least good to have for most utilities, regardless of current organization and ownership structure.

As an asset owner, LIPA requires flexibility to efficiently change its outsourced manager and service provider to secure competitive rates and fees. This implies a need for IT infrastructure, data and applications to be as close as possible to plug and play. At present, most existing information systems are owned by KeySpan, although LIPA owns the data, intellectual property and right to acquire directly critical T&D systems.

APPLICATION AND DATA ISLANDS

The goal of being a performance leader implies leadership in leveraging the latest technologies. LIPA's vision is consistent with the concepts of IntelliGrid, or Smart Grid or Self-Healing Grid. All these terms imply effective use of company-wide data and information residing in traditionally independent and also traditionally not connected systems.

We recognize that the journey toward our strategic goals requires consolidation and integration of existing and future data and systems both quickly and at a lower cost. However, the longer-term vision of true plug-and-play infrastructure also has to be developed by carefully transitioning from current infrastructure and taking into account immediate operational and business needs. An example is the KeySpan Customer Information System and Outage Management System. This is a legacy, homegrown system that needs to be replaced.

Many of the systems supporting field operations and customer care services are internally developed legacy systems and are expected to be subjected to consolidation following the planned acquisition of KeySpan into National Grid operations. LIPA seeks to implement infrastructure supporting dynamic and real-time risk and performance management in achieving its financial, technical, customer satisfaction and regulatory compliance goals.

PLUG-AND-PLAY NEED

Most of the concepts in LIPA's vision depend on the availability of data and information that historically reside in various and traditionally independent IT systems. Integration of data and systems is an essential and critical step in getting closer to the reality of plug-and-play concepts.

LIPA's adopted policy for data standardization and data integration is based on the International Electrotechnical Commission's (IEC) common information model (CIM). This is evolving as an industry-wide standard and is being developed through IEC efforts, and is supported by the Electric Power Research Institute, U.S. and international utilities, and several vendors and consultants.

Going beyond data standardization and integration, LIPA is using CIM-based technology to integrate and automate applications that combine real-time and historical data from various systems to support operation control centers, planners and asset managers.

At LIPA, there are four distinct levels of integration and each has specific technology and implementation requirements, but they are all highly interrelated and require top-level commitment and company-wide coordination:

1. Data consolidation

   STANDARDS-BASED INFRASTRUCTURE

   This includes company-wide data standardization and naming based on IEC CIM and the “wrapping” of legacy systems to ensure CIM data compatibility.

2. Data integration

   This includes integration and automated data updates, data synchronization and data quality management across various systems.

   • BENEFITS CIM AND IB APPROACH

     LIPA is standardizing on CIM-based integration bus (IB) with extensible markup language (XML) message-based publish/subscribe concepts for data updates.

   • Generic interface definitions (GID) are IEC CIM standards-based open interfaces and are used for the inte-gration of various data sources with historical and real-time data.

3. Applications integration

   This includes both horizontal and vertical integration across company data and systems (for example, the integration of financial, customer, asset, and work management data and systems, as well as the integration of transmission, distribution, and customer data and applications).

   THE NEXT STEPS

   Applications integration includes input-output data compatibility among applications, data analysis/mining of integrated data, reporting and visualization various combinations of data overlays — combining geographical, performance, risk, weather, electric network systems and other data originating from GIS, SCADA, network simulators, outage management, customer management, work management and other company systems.

4. Process automation

   This includes the integration of processes and subprocesses, and assumes elements of service-oriented architecture with components of event-driven architecture and real-time processing.