Electric Energy T&D - Index

Electric Energy T&D - EE Magazine March / April 2009 - Index

Introduction
Electric utility companies are typically using
aspects of GIS to support the various business
processes involved in managing the electric
system and providing service to customers,
such as feeding outage management and
power flow analysis systems. As more and
more new field automation technologies
— including Distribution Automation (DA),
Substation Automation (SA), Advanced
Metering Infrastructure (AMI), and Smart Grid
applications (SG) — become mainstream,
GIS plays an even more critical role.
Designing and Populating Geospatial
Systems to Support Advanced Applications
for Field Automation
By Gene Kindrachuk, Principal Consultant
Enspiria Solutions
Evolution of GIS
Early GIS systems have their roots in automated
mapping with some facilities management
capabilities. Current GIS technologies for
utilities provide not only support for spatial
data, i.e. the ability to see where facilities
are and to manage the relationships with
other spatial features, but also provide for
managing network topology of the electrical
system components.
GIS in electric utilities began in the late
1970s primarily as a tool to automate a
4 I March-April 2009 Issue
company’s manual mapping functions.
There was a strong focus on presentation of
facilities data, to ensure that symbols, line
work, and annotation were legible; and the
ability to generate multiple map products at
various scales. Some products (among them
IBM’s GFIS), however, did put an emphasis
on developing a model behind the graphical
representations of the electric facilities with
the idea of managing these facilities. In
addition to typical attribute information (dates,
material, manufacturer, model, ratings) the
models also dealt with relationships including
electrical connectivity.
As GIS has evolved over the past thirty years,
there has been an increasing emphasis on
the model of the electric system and growing
reliance on the model behind the map to
provide information to users and integrated
systems rather than focusing on multi-purpose
presentations of map-type data. Moreover,
many electric utilities are using their GIS
to provide network connectivity models to
system analysis and planning tools to perform
power flow analyses of various types, and now,
commonly to outage management systems.
Table 1 delineates the four major levels
of utility automation, from stand-alone
deployments to integration of near realtime
field automation. Each level represents
increasingly sophisticated spatial data usage,
and the expansion of advanced applications
and integrations. And each level allows the
utility to realize increasing benefits and
efficiencies in the energy delivery process. As
GIS evolves, it can help move utilities to Level
4 by becoming a key source and repository for
integration of real-time, location based data