The intelligent grid is receiving much press from the vendor community. One concept of an intelligent grid hinges on a super network connecting the national grid, the market, the consumers and the generators with an intent to optimize the overall process. Is an intelligent grid that enables a utility to completely automate the manufacture, transport, delivery and consumption of electrons doable? Even more important, is it needed? What other industry is so totally automated, even in a single plant? Maybe what we most need is a phased-in approach, where we focus on supplying the information we need to make intelligent business decisions; in effect, the tools to become a more intelligent utility.

AN ALTERNATE REALITY

Instead of focusing on the intelligence of the network, let's focus on the intelligence of utility employees. Now the primary requirement for our intelligent utility (IU) system is to provide the right information to the right persons at the right time. We must provide the information a given employee requires to efficiently perform his or her job responsibilities; of course, these needs vary dramatically.

The one upside to the new workforce equation is that almost all new hires will be computer literate. (Some colleges provide a laptop computer as part of freshman-year tuition. Visit any elementary school and try to count the computers in the classrooms.) Therefore, I'd say a second high-level requirement for this intelligent utility would be that it's user-friendly and browser based.

An employee with the need for information may not know the company's electrical grid configuration or understand power operations or anything of a technical nature — including the right terminology — but he or she does know what information is necessary to solve the problem at hand.

Here are two realities: first, the depth and breadth of applications required for a complete IU are enormous; second, utilities already have billions of dollars invested in good, solid, well-liked applications. Therefore, in developed countries a third key requirement is that the IU must work seamlessly with some — perhaps most — of a utility's existing applications. This isn't as difficult as it might sound, because most modern applications have application programming interfaces, and powerful database retrieval programs can extract data out of any application's database.

WHEN COULD THIS INTELLIGENT UTILITY BE A REALITY?

How will we know when this intelligent utility has arrived? A simple answer is when at least the high-level requirements I've laid out here have been met at a large, well-known and respected T&D company.

I'd argue that this intelligent utility system might be here already. For one thing, all the components — the required applications — are in the marketplace. Several vendors have mature offerings in each application area, from customer information to outage management to materials information, although none have all the bases covered. What's mainly missing is that third high-level requirement: It must be able to work seamlessly with some, perhaps most, of a utility's existing applications. We need that “super glue” that holds all the pieces together, a human-computer interface that's easily understood and makes it easy to access whatever data is needed, in the sense of “the right information to the right person at the right time.”

Georgia Power Co.'s (Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.) DistView system — described in “Point-and-Click Data Warehouse,” by Mary Adams in the May 2006 issue of T&D World — just might be an example of an intelligent utility system that is currently operational at a large, well-known and respected T&D company. Some would argue that there are pieces missing, but it's still awfully close.

Adams related that DistView provides access to distribution facilities data, geographical information system (GIS) data, and relevant customer, transmission, substation, and outage management data — in short, information on every object in the distribution system, every customer and every abnormal condition. At the time of writing, there were more than 1200 users from engineering, forestry, control center, lighting and marketing departments with an average of 262 daily logins of individuals taking advantage of the system.

Today we are at a critical junction as we mass our resources to crack the “intelligence” nut. It is a noble goal to build a highly automated and intelligent network, but it's a long-term goal requiring great capital investment. We still have a current need to put the knowledge in the hands of the decision-makers, so that they can make informed and effective business decisions. Let's keep an appropriate share of our focus on bringing intelligence to our people. By investing in systems that provide decision tools for our people, we will demonstrate the fruits of an intelligent utility in our lifetimes.