A smart grid analyst predicted that a buildout of the smart grid will be one of the largest creators of wealth in the decade and has likened the smart grid “to the transcontinental railroad, the phone system, the interstate highway system and the Internet.”

As smart grid technology is transforming the electric power industry, however, the skilled workforce is shrinking. To prepare for the future of the smart grid, electric utilities need to boost productivity and improve data quality.

The smart grid is a more complicated than our current grid. It includes distributed generation with micro-renewable energy sources, price signals to consumers, automated load management, bidirectional communications networks, storage and redundancy. It also supports a self-healing network that can isolate problem equipment, reconfigure itself to minimize the number of affected customers and reduce the necessary time to identify and repair the faulty equipment.

Managing and operating the new smart grid will require much higher volumes of data and data that is “100% accurate and in real time,” according to one industry analyst. Electric utilities must improve the reliability and timeliness of their information about their existing facilities, and they must change their business processes for records management in order to maintain a high level of quality for their facilities' data.

Bringing the Field into the Office

New image-capture technology is making it possible to reduce the cost of maintaining reliable information about existing facilities. The application of information technologies is also allowing utilities to break down silos of technology, to eliminate paper flows and to optimize business processes for records management to achieve and maintain the level of data quality required by the smart grid.

In the past, improving the reliability of a utility's records database required a field survey to update the records database. This can be expensive because it requires trained electric power staff, who are in short supply, to visually inspect each facility. However, it is now possible to bring down the price of resurveying existing facilities because of the availability of new geospatial imagery capture technologies like high-resolution aerial photogrammetric, oblique, mobile street and laser scanning. This technology allows electric utilities to conduct much of the work that they did in the field in the office.

Current Business Processes Inhibit Data Quality

The key reason why the quality of power utility network facility databases is typically low is because companies are following paper-based, labor-intensive business processes for records management. For example, a major problem that can be found in most utilities is as-built backlogs, which can stretch from several months to years. Another example is a business process that discourages field staff from providing valuable information back to the records department about errors they observe in the field or about changes they have made. Yet another challenge is data redundancy. Gartner, a technology research firm, has documented how in one utility, nine different groups were maintaining independently similar information about power poles.

These are examples of symptoms associated with silos of technology, where different groups use different technologies. Engineering designers use CAD tools, records clerks use geographic information system tools and asset management staff use spreadsheets. Because different tools have relied on different, proprietary data formats, information flows are slow, laborious, paper-based processes that hinder producing and maintaining reliable, timely records.

Optimizing Business Processes for Data Quality

Utilities have begun to focus on entire workflows with the objective of optimizing information flow. At a recent GITA ANZ conference in Brisbane, Australia, Graeme Athonsen of City West Water outlined his golden rules for ensuring data quality: data shall be stored only once; all data shall have an owner through data custodianship; all data shall have a quality system.

The physical architecture of the databases storing data about the organization's facilities is complex, with many operational systems with their own, often proprietary, data stores. The fundamental concept for enabling a single point of truth is data custodianship, which means that each data element has a single steward or owner who is responsible for keeping that data element current.

By enabling field workers to participate in the data quality system, the quality and timeliness of records data can be improved, with the important benefit that field staff become more productive. Through IT and the latest geospatial image-capturing technology, utilities can embrace and prepare for the smart grid challenges that lie ahead.

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Geoff Zeiss (geoff.zeiss@autodesk.com) is an at-large member of GITA's board of directors. He is also the director of technology for Autodesk Inc.