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Electric Energy T&D - Index

Electric Energy T&D - EE Magazine March / April - Index

void of context and with no business driven way
to prioritize them. I Therefore the justification
for a BSM initiative seemed simple and straight
forward and the IESO’s IT department began to
research and develop a BSM project it called
CAMS (Central Alarm Management System).
IT Finds a Conductive Partner
IT can be a lonely department when lobbying
for technology spending. By some marketwatcher
estimates, up to 60 percent of the
large enterprise’s IT budget goes towards IT
operations. In other words, more than half
of a typical IT budget goes towards keeping
things running. The other 40 percent is spent
on human resources and this often leaves
little in the way for strategic IT investments.
However, in formulating a business case to
justify the implementation of a BSM project,
the IESO’s IT operations knew their business
users were facing similar challenges. Business
users – that is staff monitoring the flow and
the buying and selling of electricity – were
also reliant on technology management tools
of a different sort. In addition to multiple
market systems that facilitate Ontario’s
electricity marketplace, much in the way a
financial service firm might support online
trading, the IESO’s system operator uses a
SCADA/EMS (Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition/Energy Management System) to
manage the electricity transmission grid.
In principle, SCADA/EMS works in a similar
fashion as IT management systems. For
example, a sharp rise or drop in voltage on a
transmission grid can easily damage electrical
equipment and appliances. Much in the way
an IT management system trips an alarm if
a server goes down, voltage, current or other
operational fluctuations can cause SCADA/
EMS alarms. The IT operations knew that the
control room operators were also considering
ways to enhance their existing alarm functions
through the consolidation of the various
systems. The IESO’s IT department and the
control room operators had been looking for
an opportunity to consolidate both electricity
and IT management systems into a single
operations management system project.
March-April 2008 Issue I
Preventing cascading events
The IESO had another vested interest in
integrating electricity grid and market
systems management into the CAMS project
by: providing even more information than
they already had to assist them in the
prevention of cascading events. As part
of the North American Electric Reliability
Corporation’s (NERC) investigation of
the blackout of August 003, which was
initiated in Ohio, regulators found that
failure of the system monitoring and
control functions over the electricity
grid were contributing factors to the
blackout. Such failures caused operators
to either delay or altogether miss corrective
measures for which the company managing
that portion of the grid was responsible.
Consequently, the events cascaded and
rapidly spread across the region. NERC
later assessed that the operator’s monitoring
system did not meet NERC requirements.
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