Electric Energy T&D - Index

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

Although benefits are difficult to precisely
quantify, there is little doubt that a power grid
failure – especially a preventable failure – has
large and perhaps unnecessary financial effect.
The Anderson Economic Group estimated the
economic impact of the August 14, 003
blackout was US$5,000,000,000. The Toronto
Dominion Bank estimated the cost to the
Ontario economy to be CAN$550,000,000.
Even momentary interruptions to the power
supply could prove costly. A brief power
interruption on April 16, 005 in Pittsburgh,
Pa. that forced a plant shutdown had an
impact on the plant owner’s earnings in the
range of $ 0 million to $ 5 million after tax.
Even though IESO monitoring tools had
always met NERC requirements, the IESO
wanted to enhance its existing grid and
market monitoring tools. Likewise, users
were looking to prioritize and manage alarms
with role-based alarm views.
CAMS, along with the proper business logic,
would augment the IESO’s system operators’
ability to operate a reliable and competitive
electricity market. IT now had a business
partner and a good case for BSM: creating a
system that was to also be used by business
users meant the IESO had a project supported
by more than just IT.
The Business Case
The business case for the IESO’s CAMS
centered on providing a flexible central
alarm system with the capability to
consolidate, correlate and provide servicebased
management of alarms across a range
technological components on a single pane
of glass. This included applications and
components from traditional IT infrastructure,
and also control room alarms from the SCADA/
EMS in addition to the sensitive, customer
facing market systems that facilitate the
energy trading environment.
The IESO considered alternative courses of
action for solving this challenge: a) upgrade
existing management systems, b) build a
custom system from scratch, or c) select a BSM
software vendor with ability to integrate all the
disparate systems onto a single console.
Upgrading the existing management systems
to include the three different monitoring
systems in HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli and
Microsoft MOM would not provide IESO a
centralized, consolidated view of the system.
By the same token, building a custom system
from scratch would not only be expensive to
build and maintain, but it would also include
inherent project risk and take a great deal of
time to complete.
In a research study by Fujitsu Consulting,
Managed Objects had been determined to
be one of the industry leaders. Further, the
company has demonstrated it had successfully
implemented its product in several industries
including energy, financial services,
government and telecommunications. As
a final test to ensure capability, the IESO
instituted a three-month proof-of-concept
before finally selecting Managed Objects as
the vendor.
Reaping the Benefits
Today, the IESO has successfully tapped BSM
to develop an integrated utility network. IT
operations aside, it has modeled five services
that are critical to the business, including
IT operations, SCADA/EMS and several
market systems. This, in turn, has led to
more efficient and effective management of
technology and has better aligned the IESO’s
IT operations with the business operations.
In the end, this has greatly simplified the
management of technology governing energy
transmission and market trading systems.
Specifically, the IESO identified wholly
positive results along four critical
dimensions:
• Seamless integration was a pivotal
achievement since the IESO already
had substantial investments in existing
and federated IT management tools. In
addition, the integration of non-traditional
IT management systems such as the
SCADA/EMS required the use of special
communication standards to enable these
separate systems to interoperate. The
neutral approach to integration enabled the
IESO to meet these requirements and to
avoid additional investments in additional
tools that can often trap enterprises in
78 I March-April 2008 Issue
being dependent on a single vendor.
• Protected investments meant that the
IESO was able to continue to leverage data
arising from it existing investment in IT
management tools including HP OpenView,
IBM Tivoli and Microsoft MOM.
• Service modeling was an important
accomplishment and the basis for
prioritizing alarms. Mapping thousands
of underlying infrastructure components
to services or applications, could prove
an onerous task. Managed Objects BSM
provided automated modeling capabilities
to facilitate this process.
• Role-based analytical views were also a
key result since user communities can now
have visualization requirements tailored
to their specific roles at the IESO. For
example, the control room operator does
not need to see event alarms stemming
from HP OpenView but would want to
be aware of information arising from its
SCADA/EMS systems. Other role-focused
views include single-sign-on views tailored
specifically for those monitoring one
of the five critical services such as the
market systems.
The energy industry is likely only to grow
increasingly reliant on technology to manage
its services and as such the line between
IT and the business will only continue to
blur. The ability to find and marry synergies
between the business side of the IESO
and IT operations has given way to an efficient
new paradigm in the form of an integrated
utility network.
About the Authors
Michele Hudnall is a former META Group
analyst and is currently director of service
management for Managed Objects.
Wang Chiu is a Senior Engineer and CAMS
Project Manager for the Independent
Electricity System Operator, Ontario.