UTILITIES ARE BEING SQUEEZED ON ALL SIDES TO PERFORM BETTER. They are pounded by regulators, hounded by special interest groups and bound by customer expectations. What is a utility to do? Fortunately, utilities have access to emerging technologies that enable them to funnel what dollars they have into the areas where they can deliver the most value. Utilities are transitioning from the labor-intensive electromechanical power system designed and built in the mid-20^th century to the advanced technology of the 21^st century; nowhere is this more evident than in the distribution system.

Utilities face daunting issues including aging infrastructure, the aging work force and the need for a regulatory framework that encourages investment in grid modernization. The transition is not going to happen overnight and it is not going to be easy, but it will be expensive.

CREATE A DATA ROADMAP

Utilities have a virtual gold mine of system data and business data available, but these databases are not readily accessible throughout the utility.

Jeremy Bloom, EPRI's manager of Power Delivery Asset Management, cites the EPRI report on information technology for asset management. Bloom says that the first step for utilities is to take the isolated equipment databases and make them available to all the people needing to use them, turning all of these desktop databases into one asset registry, in effect making them one virtual database. The virtual database allows anyone access to the data without being a computer expert. Because of the sheer amount of data in the databases, the ability to make sense of available data can be overpowering. Utilities need the data equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, and that is where the asset management system comes into play.

A digital distribution company requires the asset management system to work throughout the utility's organization. Traditional distribution utility focus has been on asset life-cycle management and one-time project-by-project management.

Greg Kneuer, principal consult with Enspiria Solutions (Greenwood Village, Colorado, U.S.), believes today's focus should be on a total cost of ownership (TCO) ideology and how these principles relate to an enterprise asset management (EAM) approach.

“Today's distribution asset managers need tools to know when and where to invest their limited resources,” says Kneuer. “Managers and leaders need to identify asset priorities and requirements critical to the vision, mission and sustaining the utility.”

Assets are not all created equal. Some assets are critical to the mission readiness. Identifying those important and critical assets and making sure limited resources are used properly is a critical part of the life-cycle management of assets. The big picture of the present and future asset needs provides management with the opportunity to maximize limited resources and become proactive in total asset management. However, as Kneuer points out, “too few have introduced coherent and sustainable policies around managing resources and assets.”

How can distribution organizations go about introducing a workable EAM strategy that is sustainable in the long term? First of all, it is necessary to sit down and think through what the organization wants to achieve and how it intends to get there.

“Many CEOs and CIOs don't have a true strategy around resource allocation and asset management,” says Kneuer. “They're doing bits and pieces in general, but they're not thinking strategically about it. They must incorporate how the operations managers and supervisors get the work done and how they operate and maintain their distribution systems. Failure to do so means that many distribution utilities end up buying point solutions that do not work together, which undermines the process of keeping resource and asset management information up to date.”

The use of a central repository to store information about the organization's assets and resources is key to any EAM initiative. Today, this repository ideally should be integrated with other corporate applications — such as the general ledger, human resources, purchasing, materials/supply chain, contract billing, accounts receivable/payable, timekeeping, customer information system, advance metering instrumentation, metering databases, geographic information system, graphical work design, other work and maintenance management systems, and document management — to ensure that any change in the status of asset or resource is recorded or updated and easy to see. Because the business and integration complexity of an EAM system can be easily resource constrained, utilities should consider retaining industry consulting services companies that staff industry and technology experts to help provide strategy expertise, technical and business process consulting, systems integration, and other implementation and rollout services.

ONE STEP AT A TIME

We must strive to develop the ability of our asset management systems to convert data into intelligence, intelligence into knowledge and knowledge into intelligent business decisions. Intelligent equipment is also part of the solution. Automated meter reading reduces labor and provides data to the utility to improve service. Technology never stands still and the smart meter continues to become smarter.

The next step is advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), which is a two-way communication between the customer and the utility. AMI is hard to justify by itself, but what if some compatible technologies are added to the equation? The cost can then be shared by other sectors of the utility. How about including intelligent switching of customers' appliances, outage management system or load management? We are beginning to define a digital distribution company.

The digital distribution company seeks to tie these and other systems together to drive the cost down and the efficiencies of the corporation up. Boyd Rice, vice president of strategic marketing for S&C Electric Co. (Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), likes to compare what is taking place in the digital distribution company with the concept of factory automation. Factories have long been increasing productivity by increasing the automation of the manufacturing process.

Rice says that our industry can similarly leverage technologies. We are moving toward an intelligent distribution enterprise by combining the management systems found in the corporate offices with the software/hardware of the engineering and operations sides of the business, as well as incorporating enhanced levels of automation previously unheard of in the old distribution system.

The corporate side of the business has been adding software to control the business. At the same time, the engineering and operations groups have been deploying smart equipment complete with sensors combined with data-capturing software to control and monitor their portion of the business.

Will Lowder, a business solutions professional with IBM Global Services' Energy & Utility Industry, believes these new sensors will flood the users with data — too much to be useful without a method to handle it. Lowder says that IBM is developing an approach within its Intelligent Utility Network solution for such a case. IBM is using advanced analytics to turn this data into useful business information. According to Lowder, most people associate IBM with the company's superior data-management capabilities. IBM specializes in taking these vast amounts of data and converting it into information a utility can use to make smart business decisions across the entire corporation. We are now seeing the marriage of high-speed computers, intelligent electronic devices and intelligent software to provide an efficient means of maintenance and operations management tools for the digital distribution company.

WALKING THE LAST MILE

There is one more area the digital distribution company needs to deal with to become successful. Consider the last mile (from the substation to the customer) of the standard distribution system; unfortunately, it has been neglected for decades, but that is beginning to change. The conventional utility person knows very little about what is taking place in this portion of their system.

Ali Ipakchi, vice president of Integration Services for KEMA, emphasizes that a utility can no longer afford not to have sophisticated monitoring equipment installed on its distribution system. He also points out it needs to be a user-friendly system that explains what all of the data mean rather than just providing data. He says AMI can be used to reduce System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) minutes when tied to intelligent outage management systems, a key element in the asset management system.

History has shown that the utility doesn't always understand the size of the outage in the stress of restoring service. That is what happened with an Eastern utility during a recent power outage. The utility significantly underestimated the size of an outage due to the lack of customer call-in reports. Customers assumed the utility knew service was out, while the utility assumed it wasn't a large outage due to the small number of customers calling in to the call center. The result was a severe outage that lasted far longer than it should have. It was a no-win situation for everyone.

Chris Hickman, executive vice president of regulatory affairs and business solutions for Cellnet (Alpharetta, Georgia, U.S.), is concerned that most utilities rely on the customer to call in the first report of an outage, even when utilities have the technology available in systems like AMI with its ability of two-way communications between the utility and the customer. He says that automation at the feeder level is less than 20% in North America.

Hickman believes AMI can monitor the condition of the feeders to the customer by notifying the utility when the meter stops receiving power. It is referred to as a “last-gasp” signal. Then the utility will know the extent of the outage and exactly how many are out of service. Crews can be dispatched directly to the cause of the outage without having to go to the substation and backtracking the feeders, saving time and reducing the outage, making the digital distribution company efficient and improving its reliability.

A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Asset management is so much more than just an information technology strategy for the front office. It transforms a collection of computer applications, advanced technologies, sophisticated sensors and monitors into virtual organization. It integrates intelligent switching, outage management tools and diagnostics abilities into a process that understands the condition of our assets. Its software capabilities allow data sharing across the enterprise. It takes the multitude of “black boxes” scattered throughout the utility's infrastructure and lets them provide high-speed information to monitor the state of the electrical distribution system.

Asset management defines the condition of the assets on the distribution system, the distribution system's work force and energy utilization throughout the utility's infrastructure. The digital distribution company is continuing to perform its daily business using fewer, less technically trained people. It is able to monitor the security of the system, while making decisions that affect the reliability of the system and the quality of the power delivered to the customer without human intervention.