NV Energy has announced the newest piece of the pie in its evolving distribution management system. Wipro Technologies has completed the implementation of an Enterprise Work and Asset Management (EWAM) platform for the utility. This project was rolled out across NV Energy’s north and south Nevada operations covering both electricity and gas distribution businesses, and Phase 1 has been completed. NV Energy is a vertically integrated utility serving 1.2 million electric customers and 145,000 gas customers in Nevada and supporting a floating population of 40 million annually.
This implementation will achieve NV Energy’s strategic objectives of standardizing systems and processes across north and south Nevada operations while reducing operating costs, achieving efficiencies in managing capital and O&M work and assets. This large implementation benefits close to 800 NV Energy employees (expanding to 1500 in future phases), and was delivered from multiple geographies. This platform has helped NV Energy consolidate processes across north and south operations, replace outdated systems and achieve scalability to support future growth in the distribution business.
The EWAM system is just the latest implementation for NV Energy. Last March, NV Energy received a $138 million grant in stimulus funding from the Department of Energy specifically for the implementation of its $301 million Advanced Service Delivery project. Through the project, NV Energy plans to replace every electric meter in the state with a smart meter designed to let ratepayers direct their energy use year-round, day and night, by moving consumption to times of the day when electricity costs less.
NV Energy also uses ABB's Network Manager DMS, which it ordered in September 2009. NV Energy had used a similar ABB Network Manager solution in southern Nevada since 2001, helping to improve system operations and outage response for over 800,000 customers. Expanding this solution into northern Nevada, NV Energy planned to provide synergies and a common platform for distribution management across its both its southern and northern Nevada territories.
The DMS is an operations management system designed to help electric distribution companies reduce operating and maintenance costs while enhancing customer service. It combines operational data, real-time communications and advanced applications with a dispatch management interface to optimize performance through data sharing.
For its SCADA and Energy Management platforms, NV Energy chose OSI in August of 2009. In anticipation of the pending 'One Nevada Transmission Line' (ON Line) project; a 230-mile, 500 kV north-south AC transmission line set to interconnect the transmission systems of NV Energy's subsidiaries in northern and southern Nevada, NVE had embarked on a system modernization project, choosing OSI to upgrade and enhance its energy management and control infrastructure, replacing and consolidating two existing legacy energy management systems.
