IT/OT Integration for Improved Storm Response

In the last couple of months, I’ve written about the impacts of Hurricane Irene and the Halloween nor’easter on electric service, particularly for people in the northeast US.

It is natural that after a major storm, people express comments and questions such as “We’re living in the digital age – why doesn’t the utility know which customers have lost power?  What can be done to improve restoration times?  What can be done to keep customers and other stakeholders informed during the outage?”

Utilities have long used different operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) systems to improve storm response.   Some of the primary systems used by utilities during storms are Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA),  Distribution Management System (DMS), Outage Management System (OMS), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Customer Information System (CIS), Mobile Workforce Management (MWM), and Business Intelligence dashboards and reporting (BI).  What’s changing is not only the increasingly functionality in those different systems, but probably even more importantly, is the integration of those systems to each other.

Integration of these systems is sometimes called “IT/OT Integration” in the utility industry, meaning that different OT systems (SCADA, DMS, OMS) are integrated with the IT  systems (MWFM, GIS, CIS, BI, for example).   The IT/OT integration permits data and information to flow freely between the system devices, work crews in the field, people in the operations centers, and storm-support personnel throughout the organization.  Even external stakeholders, including customers, government and public safety authorities, and regulators, are provided selective access to more accurate and timely information about the numbers and locations of customers out, the number and status for restoration resources, and estimate restoration times for different locations.

Examples of integrated IT/OT that improve the storm restoration process are:

Integration of AMI with OMS

The capability of some smart meters and AMI systems permit transmittal of a “last-gasp” message, or outage notification message, to the OMS when a meter loses voltage.  This permits the creation of an AMI-trouble call in the OMS, so that if a customer is delayed in calling to report an outage due to not being home or being asleep, for example, the outage is still noted and processed in the utility’s control systems.  In addition, with some AMI systems, the OMS can ping meters to determine if they are with voltage or not with voltage.  This can improve field resource efficiency, providing dispatchers and crews up-to-date information on the present location where fixes are still required.

Integration of SCADA, DMS, and OMS

Having a single integrated distribution operation system for these three operational systems, instead of three disparate, independent systems, improves operator efficiency during storms, data maintenance, and operator training.  With integrated SCADA, DMS, and OMS, available functionality now includes the transfer of status/analog points from SCADA to the DMS and OMS; the sending of supervisory control and manual override commands from the DMS and OMS to the SCADA; an integrated user interface running on the same operator console, and integrated single sign-on for users.

In addition, the integration of DMS applications in the OMS has proven to improve outage performance. For example, a fault location algorithm uses the as-operated electric network model, including the location of open switches, along with an electrical model of the distribution system with lengths and impedances of conductor segments, to estimate fault location.  This can get customers restored faster and direct crews to fault locations faster.   A Restoration Switching Analysis application evaluates the possible isolation and restoration switching actions that can be done upon occurrence of a permanent fault. The application executes an unbalanced load flow to determine overloaded lines and low-voltage violations for each switching action, and the operator is provided with a listing of recommended switching actions.  The switching actions can also be executed automatically, so that customers outside the fault zone can be restored in a matter of minutes.

Integration of MWM and OMS

Interfaces between the outage management system have the mobile workforce management system have become increasingly mature.  This enables improved communications between the control center and the field resources, and reduces the time for radio communications and manual research.   Crews can report their status, outage status, update estimated times to restore, and more functions through their field devices.    This functionality will continue to grow as mobile technologies and integration technologies evolve.

Integration of BI with All the Different Systems in the Utility

The integration of BI to all the different systems, including OMS and MWM, provide dashboards, reports, and queries, configured specifically for persons depending upon their roles and responsibilities.  A set of operational dashboards enables a near real-time display of summary views that support the ability to drill into outage event details.  Dashboard sutilizes an organizational hierarchy to filter the date by service center, district, geographic location, and additional spatial or organizational criteria.  The outage events are displayed by the Total Number of Outages, Number of Dispatched Outages, Number of Non Dispatched Outages, Device Outages, Customers Out, Priority Customers Out, Locked out Feeders, Active Storm Status, Expired Estimated Restoration Times (ERT), Wires Down, and Configurable ERT thresholds.

The integration of these different IT/OT systems permits storm responders to restore power more quickly and safely than ever before - which means life can return to normal more quickly for all of us.

East Coast Outages - Again

Two months after Irene knocked out power to millions of customers on the East Coast, the Halloween nor'easter of 2011 left millions of homes and business dark again.  In some places in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, patience is wearing thin with the pace of electric restoration.  But what's causing this, and is it justified?

One reason that complaints are high with the Halloween storm is that this is the second event in a short amount of time.  People's patience wears thin the more times an aggravating event occurs.  When I'm in traffic and one guy cuts me off, I'm slightly annoyed.  A second car cuts me off, and I'm not getting disturbed.  A third guy does it and my fuse is gone.  I think a lot of people are like this, and this second event is wearing on their nerves.  If the East Coast gets another storm in the next couple of months, then people will be even more primed to react.

Obviously there is also a societal and economic factor in this.  Whenever a major event occurs that shuts down businesses, keeps people from shopping, and stops the flow of money, it has a high impact on people. No power for a small business that depends upon every day's receipts to stay afloat can be devastating.  The poor state of the economy only exacerbates this.

Another contributing factor to the severity of the storm appears to be the amount of advance warning that everyone had.  With Hurricane Irene, the attention the storm got as it approached the East Coast was enormous (I'm not saying unjustified), and everyone had days to prepare for the upcoming damage.  This includes the utilities, whose preparation work includes lining up crews from other utilities through pre-arranged mutual assistance agreement, placing resources in the right locations before the storms, insuring there is adequate inventory and spares for damaged equipment, and all of the logistics that go into preparing for the coming recovery over the next several days.  With the Halloween nor'easter, some are saying that the limited advance warning impacted the number of crews that were immediately available and ready to work, with the result being extended times for restoration compared to the restoration time with more advance warning.

In a future post, I'll describe how integration of the systems that utilities use in storm restoration assist with the getting the lights back on quicker.  That includes the outage management system, mobile workforce management system, interactive voice response, and situational awareness / dashboards / reporting.  But for now, let's hope Mother Nature gives us a break for a while.

Volt/VAR Control - Old Problem, New Solution

Volt/VAR Control.  Volt/VAR Optimization.  Real power and energy loss minimization.  Conservation voltage reduction.   Integrated volt/VAR control.  Model-based volt/VAR optimization.

Whatever you call it, one of the applications receiving the most attention in the smart grid world right now is volt/VAR optimization on distribution feeders.  Many folks, though, don’t realize that the problem of optimizing VAR flow, minimizing real power losses, and maintaining a target voltage level for electric loads has been around as long as the 130 years that electric power systems have been around.

In doing some reading about electric power industry pioneers the other day, I discovered that voltage drop and real power losses were a contributing factor to the invention of the incandescent light bulb.  It turns out that back in the late 1870’s, the majority of the research on suitable materials for the light bulb filament focused on low-resistance materials.  Thomas Edison chose to go down a different path instead.  He focused on high-resistance materials for the filament, and his reasoning was this:  in order to construct an economic power system, it would require small diameter conductors, because they were much less expensive than larger-diameter conductors.  (Imagine having to run 477 ACSR to every house!)  Edison knew if a system was going to be built with small conductors, then it would require low load currents so that excessive voltage drop and power losses would not be introduced.  And in order to get low currents, he knew that the light bulb, one of the “killer apps” of the electric world at that time, would have to have a high-resistance filament.

So evaluating the economics of the complete power system from the perspective of voltage drop and real power losses drove Edison to focus on high-resistance filaments, instead of low-resistance filaments.  This led to his eventual discovery of the carbonized cotton-thread filament, and subsequently the carbonized cardboard filament, that evolved into the commercially-viable incandescent light that changed the world.  Edison’s approach, looking to counter the still-present adversaries of voltage drop and real power losses, ultimately led to his finding the high-resistance filament for the first commercially-viable light bulbs. 

Now Edison was advocating a dc (direct current) system, and not the ac (alternating current) system that eventually proved to be the winner.  So he wasn’t even dealing with the reactive component of the current flows that typically produce the greatest amount of voltage drop and real power losses in distribution systems.   When the ac system of Tesla/Westinghouse eventually won “The War of the Currents”, then engineers had to deal with the reactive current flow creating voltage drop and real power losses as well.

Over the years, many solutions have been developed to deal with the effects of voltage drop and real power losses on distribution systems.  To produce VAR’s as close as possible to equipment requiring them, and minimize VAR flow on distribution lines, capacitors were developed.  Capacitors could be either fixed (connected to the system at all times) or switched on and off the system through the use of control variables such as time, current, VAR, voltage, or temperature.  The load tap changing transformer used in distribution substations for changing the voltage at the substation was developed.  Free standing voltage regulators, with the ability to be installed in either the substation or along the distribution lines, were developed.  Line drop compensation on voltage regulation equipment was developed for improved voltage control under variable load conditions. 

One of my friends in the industry said he had actually seen equipment, on the system of the utility that he was working for, that were called “capaciformers”.  The capaciformer was a distribution transformer which also had capacitors that were contained in it.  The concept was that any time you needed to add a distribution transformer to serve new load on the system, you could add a capaciformer.  In this way, the capacitors and their VAR supply would be inherently added as the load grew, since it was known that the load was going to require a VAR supply anyway.  So instead of adding separate capacitors later, you could just add the capacitance when the transformer is installed.  Since today’s distribution systems aren’t blanketed with capaciformers (primarily because of their inflexibility in adapting to the large variability in VAR requirements, as well as the variations in real power load, on the system), they obviously didn’t work out.  But it does illustrate the effort that has gone into volt/VAR control over the years.

A review of the industry literature also shows that volt/VAR control in distribution systems has always been a popular subject.  It seemed to hit a peak in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, after the energy crisis in the mid-1970’s.  But then it seemed to be relatively dormant in the 1990’s and into the 2000’s. So why all the attention now, on a problem that has been around for 130 years?  Well, there are several reasons for this.

One, electric power system operating objectives have changed.  Over the last couple of years, minimization of customer demand and minimization of losses have become more important in many locales.  And improved volt/VAR control is typically a very cost-effective means to these goals.  Think about this – for at 5000 MW distribution organization, which has to pay an equivalent capitalized charge of $1000/kW for peak demand, a 1% reduction in peak demand is worth $50M.  And despite the lack of load growth in some locations due to the slow economy, the green/efficiency movement continues, increasing the value of energy reduction measures, even when demand reduction is not as critical.

Two, the methods developed for volt/VAR control in the past don’t work as well as the model-based volt/VAR methods that have been developed recently.   Figure 1 provides a brief history of volt/VAR control methods.  Older methods have a number of weaknesses, including the fact that they can’t keep up with the continuous changes that are made on a distribution system, including both the planning and design changes that happen year-to-year and the operating changes that occur day-to-day.  Loads and capacitor banks routinely get transferred between feeders, rendering the older volt/VAR control methods less effective.  The older centralized control methods were also based on heuristics, and not formal mathematical optimization – results were almost always less than optimal.  The model-based volt/VAR system of today considers the as-operated state of the distribution system, and can apply true mathematical optimization to achieve maximum reduction of real power losses and customer demand.

Third, leading distribution organizations have been implementing a technology platform, which volt/VAR is able to leverage while sharing the expense of that platform with other distribution processes.  The technology platform includes GIS (geographic information system), which distribution organizations typically use as their record of distribution assets and system connectivity.  The GIS also provides the basis of the operating model for DMS applications such as model-based volt/VAR optimization.  The technology platform also includes DMS and SCADA systems that provide centralized control applications for efficient management of the distribution system.  The technologies also include the improved communications systems that distribution organizations have been installing for communicating with field devices and customer AMI meters.   Other processes in the utility are able to leverage these investments, including outage management, feeder monitoring, fault location and restoration switching, work management, and equipment condition monitoring.   When a utility considers the benefits of all these processes, and the shared cost of the infrastructure among all these processes, then the business case for model-based volt/VAR economics is very strong.

More information on model-based volt/VAR optimization is contained in a white paper that can be downloaded free of charge from www.ventyx.com.

Hurricane Irene, Nikola Tesla, and Power Restoration

This post was originally written on September 8, 2011

On Sunday August 28, the center of the hurricane/tropic storm named Irene went about 30 miles west of Shoreham, NY, located on the Long Island Sound.  Being on the east side of the storm, Shoreham and the rest of Long Island were exposed to its greatest fury.  At its peak, 523,000 Long Island Power Authority customers were without power.

Irene had already plowed up the East Coast, wreaking havoc and creating power outages in every state it passed over.  According to the Department of Energy, 6.7 million customers had no power on that Sunday.  On the following Thursday, nearly 1 million customers still had no lights.  The primary reason that so many were without power were the overhead transmission lines and distribution lines that were taken down by the high winds and trees.

So what’s the significance of the storm blowing through Shoreham, NY?   In the early 1900s in Shoreham, Nikola Tesla performed electric power engineering research.  Tesla had already developed polyphase alternating current (ac) system of generators, motors and transformers and held 40 basic U.S. patents on the system.  George Westinghouse recognized the potential of Tesla’s inventions and bought his patents and commercialized the technology.  Tesla’s ac technology proved to superior to the direct current (dc) system that Thomas Edison argued for and eventually won the battle, just as VHS defeated Beta in the VCR wars of the 1980s. 1893 marked a milestone for the industrial world, with the huge demonstration of the Westinghouse/Tesla polyphase ac system at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Tesla was the mastermind behind the ac power system that has transformed the world from the 1880s until today.  His impact was so great that, in 1997, Tesla was named one of the 100 most important people in the last 1,000 years.  So Irene essentially knocked out large parts of the ac power system that Tesla, who spent much of life in the New York City, had done so much to develop and invent.  For more than a week, many customers would not be able to turn on their lights, refrigerators, air conditioners, and even the induction motors that Tesla had invented.

But the irony doesn’t stop there.  From 1901 to 1905, Tesla built the Tesla Laboratory and the Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, using funds from the financial titan J.P Morgan.  Besides serving as a communications broadcast center, the tower was also designed to deliver electric power without wires.   The energy would be transmitted through the ionosphere and the ground to the whole planet.  It would behave much like radio transmission.  Essentially, Tesla wanted to saturate the surface of the globe with electricity for global use, without the use of wires.

The Wardenclyffe Tower and the Tesla Laboratory in Shoreham, NY

Photo from the web site of the Tesla Memorial Society of New York, www.teslasociety.com.

But it never worked out, and the tower was torn down in 1917.  But think how much the electric power world would have been different if the concept had proved successful.  No electric lines costing billions of dollars to construct.  No periodic costly tree trimming to undertake.  The huge electric power disruptions, like those caused by Irene, might be greatly minimized.   But, without that successful technology development in Shoreham, Irene charged through Long Island almost 100 years later, turning off the lights for days for so many people.

After such storms, there are always those who ask, “Why don’t we just make all the electric power facilities underground?”  Study after study has shown that economically, it just isn’t feasible.  While the expense is justified in certain cases—for example, where it is decided that aesthetics are of driving importance—the cost of burying existing electric facilities on a large scale is an amount that society is not willing to bear.

So then people ask, “Why can’t the power be fixed any faster?”  They look out the windows and see the storm is long gone.  “It’s been sunny now for three days, four days, a week, and the power still isn’t on.  Why?  The power companies aren’t prepared to deal with this!  They’re not doing their jobs!  Certainly we should be able to restore power quicker with all the technology available to us!”

The answer is that utilities and distribution organizations have long focused on storm response and getting the lights back on quicker.  There are already many things being done, and more that technology providers and utilities are working on.

·         Modern geographic information system (GIS)-based outage management systems have been around since the early 1990s and are in common use throughout the power industry.  They assist electric distribution organizations with predicting where outages have occurred, based on the location of customer phone calls and indications from their automated monitoring systems (commonly called SCADA – supervisory control and data acquisition).  The outage management systems assist the power providers by providing them a visualization of where the outages have occurred, and with managing the crews and resources to get power restored.  Utilities are able to manage their own crews, as well as crews that come into the storm area from other areas and states.  The outage management systems also assist with prioritizing the outages, which is typically based on restoring service to critical customers like hospitals and emergency response providers first and giving higher priority to outages affecting larger numbers of customers.

·         Over the years, outage management systems have changed their computing architectures as information technologies have evolved.  They have evolved from mainframe systems to distributed client-server systems that are capable of handing millions of customer outages during a storm.

·         Improved interoperability between the outage management system and other utility systems has also evolved.  This includes automated interfaces between the outage management system and the mobile workforce management system, which is how many electric power providers communicate with the field crews during storms.  Just as mobile computing technologies have changed the world in just the last five years,  the mobile systems that utilities use are constantly improving so that crews can work more efficiently and get the lights back on quicker.

·         The interoperability between systems also includes interfaces between the smart meters that are being installed for many electric customers.  Many of the smart meters have the capability to communicate their status to the electric provider, indicating if power has been lost or if it has been restored.  This can improve the efficiency of the provider, and lead to less outage times for customers.

·         Advances in information technologies now provide utilities with improved situational awareness during storms.  The use of business intelligence tools permits utilities to extract information from all their available IT systems, including outage management, mobile workforce management, smart metering systems, geographic mapping systems, etc.  All of this information is used to provide dashboards, trends, and geographical depictions of what is happening to utility management and personnel on a near real-time basis.  The result is that the utility has a much better understanding of the problems on the systems and the resources at their disposal to fix the problems.  They able to respond much quicker to large-scale events like Irene.

So  even though it may have seemed to some of us that Irene mockingly drove through the site of Tesla’s laboratory on wireless power transmission on Long Island last month, we continue to use technology to get the upper hand on storms and get power restored quicker.  There is always room for improvement in getting the lights back on, and even though we don’t have wireless power transmission available to us, we will continue to use the technologies available to us in battling the forces of nature.