Great River Energy of Elk River, Minnesota, has awarded Open Systems International a contract to be the supplier of its next-generation Energy Management System (EMS) technology.

This project marks a milestone for OSI, as Great River Energy will be its first customer to implement  OSI’s brand new state-of-the-art graphical user interface based on Microsoft’s .NET technology. The graphics architecture, OpenView.NET, is OSI’s latest release of its flexible and open monarch platform, with many new features and functionality, including 3D visualization capability to increase operator efficiency.

Great River Energy is the second largest electric utility in the state of Minnesota and the fourth-largest generation and transmission cooperative in the United States in terms of assets. Its 28 distribution cooperatives in
Minnesota and Wisconsin distribute electricity to approximately 600,000 homes, businesses and farms. 21 of the utility’s member cooperatives throughout the region will have staff operating their distribution networks through Great River Energy remote consoles. The majority of users have 8-5 operations with three users switching to Great River Energy for after-hours coverage. Several users also run 24x7 operations from remote consoles.

Great River Energy’s motivation for choosing OSI has been OSI’s delivery performance, open and modern technology and its customer service. The new system replaces a current system supplied by General Electric (GE). The new system is based on OSI’s monarch distributed open architecture with an
advanced graphical user interface based on Microsoft’s .NET technology, and includes Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, Automatic Generation Control and Dispatch (AGC), Historical Information System, Transmission Network Analysis, Web-based Graphical User Interface, Operator Training Simulator and Secure ICCP communications, as well as capability for a hot standby backup/disaster recovery control system.