Outdoorsmen Yevgeniy “Yev” Postnov and Trevor Lamb went to work at Sacramento Municipal Utility District, better known as SMUD, straight out of college.
Postnov, the snowboarding, weightlifting, hiking foodie, is a distribution operations engineer. Lamb, an attorney who has managed SMUD’s advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) contracts for 13 years, spends his free time fishing the Pacific Northwest for king salmon and kokanee, a landlocked form of sockeye. Experienced through their interests and careers, Lamb and Postnov will present a session called “NextGen AMI and Big Data Needs for a Zero Carbon Future” on Sept. 14 during the T&D World Live Conference.
“During college, I interned in SMUD’s energy management system and research and development departments, where I was exposed to SCADA, renewable energy solutions and energy storage,” Postnov said. “After graduating during the pandemic, I was successful in obtaining a position on the distribution operations engineering team that was deploying an ADMS and DERMS platform, along with taking over D-SCADA.”
Postnov said SMUD’s advanced distribution management system (ADMS) deployment immersed him far enough into projects that he could see technologies interact with one another.
“Specifically,” he said, “I was involved with leveraging data from AMI 1.0 and SCADA while working on the distribution power flow advanced application development and implementation to create as accurate of a distribution system model as possible for our operators to utilize.
“During this time, I worked very closely with our lead operators and gained insight on the existing resources they use and the resources that were missing, especially when dealing with new scenarios arising with a high penetration of DERs on our grid.”
Postnov, during his part of the session, will share what SMUD looks forward to with AMI 2.0, what new data will be available, and how enhancements will affect distribution operations and integrate into ADMS and distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS). Postnov said he expects further strengthening of these platforms and that customers’ DERs will be enabled for grid participation.
“As many utilities are moving forward with ADMS and DERMS deployments, it is crucial to understand how information from the field drives the accuracy and benefits of these platforms’ advanced applications,” Postnov said. “With AMI 2.0 coming into the utility sphere at this time, it is important to plan for handling the increase in data and how it can be leveraged to provide new tools for grid operators to utilize with this new, unpredictable bidirectional grid that we are starting to see with all of the DERs that are coming online.”
Lamb will share his AMI experience, too.
“I joined SMUD right out of law school reviewing and managing technology contracts. OMS and GIS were my first,” Lamb said. “One day, someone suggested that since I was an attorney, I could probably help write a grant. That was my introduction to the world of AMI.”
A core team member in the development of SMUD’s AMI roadmap, Lamb is a co-author of grant applications in the AMI space, including SMUD’s successful $127.5 million ARRA Smart Grid Investment Grant (SGIG), SmartSacramento.
During his part of the session, Lamb will explain the importance of an AMI roadmap and integration opportunities provided by distributed intelligence at the grid edge.
“The volume and granularity of data available for grid management will be increasing exponentially with next-generation technologies,” Lamb said. “Having a roadmap to help understand how these technology changes can benefit you and your customers is critical to success.”
The T&D World Live Conference will be Sept. 12-14 in Sacramento, California. Registration, conference and event details are available on the conference website.
Kristen Wright is a journalist with more than 20 years’ experience covering global utilities, petroleum and policy. She is chief strategist at Kristen Wright Strategic Communications. Reach her at [email protected] and wrightkristenm on LinkedIn.
