LiveData and Oracle have deployed a SCADA integration solution for distribution outage management for Georgia Power Company. The largest electric utility in Georgia, GPC has improved its response to outages and other distribution issues using Oracle Utilities Outage Management SCADA and the LiveData ICCP Server.

GPC’s Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system gathers information from remote sensors, learning the status of devices on the power network. The LiveData ICCP Server interfaces data to Oracle Utilities’s network management adapter. Once SCADA data reaches Oracle Utilities Outage Management SCADA, the Oracle Utilities network management system integrates and analyzes it to identify power distribution issues.

The Inter-Control Center Protocol (ICCP) is an interconnection standard between SCADA and energy management systems (EMS). Oracle Utilities brings its expertise of analyzing SCADA data for distribution network outages, by interfacing to LiveData’s ICCP Server. LiveData provides the ICCP protocol product and protocol expertise for ICCP data exchange with SCADA and EMS systems.

Providing outage management systems with SCADA data results in more efficient outage analysis, and immediately allows operators to see SCADA-detected outages in the outage management system. Seeing device status and changes allows user to react more quickly and with more flexibility than waiting for customer service calls.

In the past, customers suffering a power outage would call-in to GPC’s customer care center, and then the system would try to discern the location and cause (a breaker, a transformer, downed power line, etc.). Using SCADA and network management software takes the guesswork out of it. Now, if a customer calls in, sensors may have already reported and isolated the problem. The system will enable the service desk to inform callers that GPC is aware that the power is out, and estimate time to restoration.

“It removes a layer of complexity, we can predict, don’t need to use a series of customer calls to know what’s going on. This helps improve reliability and customer satisfaction,” said Duncan Livsey, senior applications analyst at Georgia Power.

“For the first time, outage information from SCADA events, such as feeder breaker lockouts, are identified in the outage management system,” said Livsey. “Connecting our SCADA information with our outage management system reduces restoration time both directly, by accelerating the analysis of the outage, and indirectly by freeing operators from manually entering SCADA events.”

“In the past SCADA data was limited to the SCADA system’s consoles,” said Ronald Lambert, manager of LiveData Utility Professional Services. “Our compatability with Oracle Utilities allows our customers to leverage their investment in SCADA infrastructure into improved outage management.”