Listen in to get a deep dive into key topics like network modeling, the role of geospatial systems and GIS in improving data integration, and the necessity of creating a single source of truth for utility operations. This episode is packed with practical insights and real-world examples, plus the discussion teases upcoming topics such as enterprise data access and the future of AI in utility management, offering a compelling reason to tune in to future episodes.
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Thanks to the sponsor of this episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast: Esri
Key Links:
Episode 1 of this three-part series, “Episode #178: “Breaking Boundaries: Cross-Industry Innovation at IMGIS 2024″ with Pat Hohl and Bill Meehan, Directors at ESRI [Special Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast Presented by ESRI]”: https://energycentral.com/c/iu/episode-178-breaking-boundaries-cross-industry-innovation-imgis-2024-pat-hohl-and
GIS for Electric Utilities from ESRI: https://www.esri.com/en-us/industries/electric/overview
Other previous podcast appearances from Pat and Bill
Episode 10: ‘The Past & Future of Circuits & How GIS is Transforming the Grid, COVID-19 Response, & More’: https://energycentral.com/c/iu/energy-central-power-perspectives%E2%84%A2-podcast-episode-10-%E2%80%98-past-future-circuits-how
Episode 12: ‘To Unlock the Modern Utility, GIS is Key’: https://energycentral.com/c/iu/energy-central-power-perspectives%E2%84%A2-podcast-episode-12-%E2%80%98-unlock-modern-utility-gis
Episode 47: ‘GIS, Digital Twin, and the Intelligent Reality of Utilities Today’: https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/special-edition-gis-digital-twin-and-intelligent-reality-utilities-today-pat-hohl
Episode 80: ‘Taking a Geographic Approach to Public Grid Investment’: https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/episode-80-taking-geographic-approach-public-grid-investment-bill-meehan-and-pat
Episode 95: ‘Debating Utilities’ Role In Transportation Electrification’: https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/episode-95-debating-utilities-role-transportation-electrification-esris-bill
Episode 131: ‘Unlocking the Power of GIS: Sharing, Understanding, and Capturing Utility Data’: https://energycentral.com/o/esri/special-episode-unlocking-power-gis-sharing-understanding-and-capturing-utility
Episode 132: ‘Harnessing GIS for Strategic Utility Insight’: https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/special-episode-harnessing-gis-strategic-utility-insight-pat-hohl-and-bill-meehan
Episode 133: ‘The Role of GIS Data, Mobility, and Digital Twins’: https://energycentral.com/c/iu/special-episode-role-gis-data-mobility-and-digital-twins-pat-hohl-and-bill-meehan
Pat Hohl’s Energy Central Profile: energycentral.com/member/profile/204983/about
Bill Meehan’s Energy Central Profile: https://energycentral.com/member/profile/360/about
Ask a Question to Our Future Guests: Do you have a burning question for the utility executives and energy industry thought leaders that we feature each week on the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast? Do you want to hear your voice on a future episode? Well starting in 2024, we’re offering you that opportunity! Head to this link where you can leave us a recorded message, including a question you’re eager to have answered on a future episode of the podcast. We’ll listen through them, pick out the right guests in our upcoming lineup to address them, and you’ll hear yourself as a part of the conversation! Energy Central on SpeakPipe: www.speakpipe.com/EnergyCentralPodcast
TRANSCRIPT
Matt Chester:
Welcome to another special episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to introduce you to part 2 of the series where the podcast is taken over by Energy Central experts and directors at Esri, Pat Hohl and Bill Meehan. In this iteration of the show, they will be diving deep into the challenges utilities face and how they’re modernizing the way they manage their networks. As always, Pat and Bill bring their decades of experience working with utility companies and offer unparalleled insight into how utilities are adapting to rapid changes in technology and energy demand.
Specifically, listen on to hear how they break down key topics such as network modeling, the integration of systems like ADMS, DERMS, and advanced metering, as well as the importance of data quality and governance. It’s going to be a fascinating discussion on how to stay ahead in the ever-evolving utility landscape. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Pat Hohl:
Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another podcast. Bill, it’s great to be here with you as always.
Bill Meehan:
Yeah, it’s great too, Pat, to be with you.
Pat Hohl:
Our subject today is how utilities are facing various challenges and what it means to modernize the way that they manage those networks and specifically the information component of that. Boy, we know utilities are facing a lot of challenges. We’ve got ADMS and DERMS, renewable integration, which leads to transmission expansion, electrification of transportation. These all drive to network impacts, which all drives to information about the network. Many systems, many people need up-to-date information about the network.
Esri as a company is used by most utilities around the world to manage their networks. We saw this coming years ago, and for that reason invested in new technology and new capabilities to help do that. We’ve reached a significant milestone I would say, in that that technology is mature and that it is now being adopted by utilities around the world. Bill, in your mind, break this down into a couple of buckets for us. What does that mean?
Bill Meehan:
Yeah, I agree, Pat, that the utility industry is really changing so rapidly that we are going to have to do something, especially the electric utility business. We’re going to have to change the way we think about it. Even though utilities have been using GIS for many years, it’s been a lot of it is based on replicating our mapping system maps. We’ve done more and more with maps, we’ve made them much more intelligent, and we’ve used them in more ways, but it’s really a bit more like modeling.
We need to model the network more so than we’ve ever done before. So we’re going to talk in this podcast about modeling particularly and maybe how it differs from a mapping orientation. Then in this podcast, we’re going to talk about the value of integration. You mentioned ADMS and SCADA and AMI, which is advanced media and infrastructure. So all of these things have to go together as well as customer engagement.
So the notion of this podcast, we’re going to talk about modeling. Then we’re going to talk a lot about interoperability of how these things all work together. If we have too many different systems all operating independently, you have to bounce from one thing to another.
I know about you, we both ran operations. We’re in a control room and we’ve got spreadsheets in the floor room, we’ve got video cameras and we’ve got news and weather stations and SCADA system. We’ve got all this stuff. If it doesn’t work together, it’s extremely difficult to make rational decisions quickly. So this podcast is going to cover modeling and integration and interoperability.
Then the next podcast, so stay tuned for our next podcast, we’re going to talk about this concept of access, of enterprise access, of being able to access information quickly and between in systems and between different stakeholders. Then finally, this drives me absolutely crazy, data quality and data governance. If you don’t have good data, then things just fall apart.
So one of the examples that I like to use is one of our customers has done a really big implementation of what we call the ArcGIS Utility network. There’s a quote that they use, this GIS is used by more and more departments. If it’s just a mapping model, then it probably isn’t used by more and more departments. It may be used by the mapping department or maybe by the field crews within their maps.
Now with GIS being really used as an enterprise system, a broad enterprise system, it’s being used by many, many more people. So, Pat, talk a little bit about modeling and how you see this evolution from a mapping system to a modeling system, still using geospatial and maps as an integral part of it, but not only as a mapping system.
Pat Hohl:
Well, you know data quality is one of my pet peeves. I think you’re setting me up, but as you were speaking, that’s immediately where my mind went. I would encourage you to come back next podcast and help us get into governance and data quality. Modeling is foundational. As you pointed out most utilities have been using GIS to create maps and manage their infrastructure and forward-looking individuals realized that was almost a model of the network.
It was really a picture at the beginning, but people that were looking forward realized that was very, very valuable data that was going to help us with analytics down the road and to be able to do things like maintain connectivity and tracing about the network. Now as we look to ADMS and DERMS, that information about what is actually on the network today and how it’s configured is absolutely critical. You and I have been talking to a lot of customers around the world in the last six months about their examples.
Like you, I’ve got a couple of quotes in my head. I remember one gentleman from back East had said that GIS is now the foundation for keeping that ADMS populated with up-to-date accurate network information. To me that is the essence of modeling. You need to model more detail. You need make that part easy by making the system that you’re putting the data into smart enough that you don’t have to do rote, repetitive things, that it can manage that part for you.
Bill, I’m always thinking about AI and AI is as bad today as it will ever be. It’s only going to get better. AI runs on data and future AI applications are going to need the very best data that we can give it. So lots of customers are now looking at how do they break down those data silos. Planning has one view of the world. ADMS has a view of the world, operations has a view of the world, maintenance has another view of the world.
How do we bring all those things together, model them in a complete way that can be interoperable with the systems that we utilize within utilities, but also all the different people in the utility that have to have knowledge of that network information? Whether that’s in the bucket truck or at the customer service terminal.
Bill Meehan:
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. When you talked about the different models of the network, I think about if you were a stranger and you weren’t part of this, you walked in and you’d say, so you have multiple kind of networks. You have one network that looks like this and you have another network that looks like this. No, no, no, it’s just one network. Well then how come we have so many different models of the network? Well, it depends on what you want to do with it. Well, that doesn’t seem right to me.
So when you think about a model, and I’ve been involved heavily in looking at the transmission system, and one of the things that we used to do routinely for transmission was worry about insulation coordination. The value of an… You get a lightning strike and if it’s too big or the line will trip out, it’s horrible.
Then I think about, well, where is the data that people are using for that insulation coordination? It’s probably on Harry’s hard drive. Somebody’s got that data and they’re keeping it because it’s specialized for them, but just one network. I think what happens is as we’re evolving, as we’re evolving this network model that we really need one model of the network. All of the other abstractions, the schematics and the insulation coordination data or the load flow data, all of that stuff can be derived from that.
If you start with all these different models, when somebody makes a change over here, it’s the whole left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. What if Harry is out sick that day and he forgot to update something and then his calculations are going to be wrong. So accuracy of analytics really depends on a good consistent model. That’s kind of what we’ve been doing.
Now, one of our customers recently implemented a transmission system network model using the ArcGIS utility networks, Ameren. They really are talking about things like a single source of truth. If we’re talking about a single source of truth and we are missing pieces, we’re missing insulators or grounding systems, then it really isn’t.
It’s partial truth. It isn’t the full truth and you can’t really do operations. Yes, you can operate and we’ve done it for years, but then the efficiency, the accuracy, the error prones, the safety issues all get impacted if we don’t have a really solid model. That’s what we’ve been doing.
I think Jack Dangermond, our owner and founder, he says we’ve reached kind of a milestone where this is a model that can take us into the future and the future of electric utilities is both the great news. I mean, it’s great news if you’re in that business because it’s going to expand rapidly. There’s also some bad news is that we’ve got so many challenges ahead to make sure that that network is modeled correctly and that it’s analyzed correctly and it’s built correctly.
So yeah, I mean I think we’ve got a lot of work to do. That’s why it’s important to have a solid model of the electrical network and the gas network and the water. All of these networks, not just the electrical network.
Pat Hohl:
Absolutely. Well, last year I had the privilege of working with ESO, which is a large utility in Lithuania, and they’re working on these exact things. They had made some tremendous progress. They replaced all of their paper in the field with tablets and modernized all of their paper-based processes in the office as a step to modernize the way that they managed their network.
They did that with CIM, the common information model. I know that you were involved in research project. I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole in the interest of time, but could you just touch on how CIM affects this issue from your point of view?
Bill Meehan:
Yeah, common information model, we could go down a fairly large rabbit hole with CIM. Common information model is based on a standard, an international standard, which is the International Electrotechnical Commission. It is based on a series of attributes and models that allow companies to… Networks, not companies, but systems to be interoperable to each other.
So rather than have a special interoperability section for say, GIS to ADMS and a different one for GIS to load flow and a different kind of system, these one-off interoperabilities. What CIM is, a standard way. So GIS populates a CIM standard model, and then ADMS consumes a CIM standard model. Load flow consumes a standard CIM model. So everybody is working from the same page.
Now it reminds me in many ways of the United Nations, everybody speaks a different language. Everybody in the United Nations speaks a different language. So how do they communicate to each other? Well, they pick a standard and it happens to be English. So the people in France have translators going from French to English, and then people in Japan have translators that goes from English to Japanese.
Imagine if everybody had to say, well, I’m speaking to the Japanese, so I’ve got to go French to Japanese, French to Italian, it would be crazy. So that’s kind of what CIM is. It’s like a standard language for things like all of the attributes, transformer connections and transformer impedances, and cable design, all of that stuff.
So ESO as well as actually Hong Kong Electric has done the same thing. They’ve created interoperabilities between their GIS model and all of the other corporate models that need that data. So it’s really a cool thing and it’s quite great.
One of the things I think, you think about the complexity of all of these different ways of even naming things, like somebody says transformer was transformer and somebody says exformer. It’s all that sort of stuff. It gets so confusing. One of the pioneers in GIS, his name is Scott Morehouse. You remember Scott from Esri? I think he’s still working part-time.
I love what Scott said. He said, “Simple scales, complex fails.” So can you imagine all these custom integrations, all of this, it’d be just so complicated. That’s where mistakes get made. So simple scales, complex fails, and that’s kind of what our customers have been doing with some of this interoperability.
That actually goes beyond just interoperability between say, two corporate systems. It’s also interoperability between field devices, like between GIS and mobile devices. That level of interoperability is so smooth that you hardly know, well, am I on a tablet or iPhone or a Android phone or what? It’s all seamless integration and that really is powerful.
Pat Hohl:
It sure is. Well, we’ve touched on a lot. This is really just dancing around the idea of how do we enable the digital utility of the future, spatially enable it as we deal with more complexity and more data, the desire to have more analytics and really a common operating picture for the utility, its people and its systems.
You and I have been working on an ebook that relates to all of these topics and we will link to that in the description. I would encourage any listeners to check that out. There’s over 25 examples of utilities around the world. We’ve just touched on a few of the ones we’ve been working with here. I think that you’ll really enjoy that as we dive into it and join us next time as we get into enterprise-wide access and data quality.
Bill Meehan:
I know you’re going to love listening to Pat Hohl talk about data quality. I know as both of us, we’ve been burnt so much by data quality and this is one of the really benefits of this new network model. So we’ll see you then.
About Energy Central Podcasts
The ‘Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast’ features conversations with thought leaders in the utility sector. At least twice monthly, we connect with an Energy Central Power Industry Network community member to discuss compelling topics that impact professionals who work in the power industry. Some podcasts may be a continuation of thought-provoking posts or discussions started in the community or with an industry leader that is interested in sharing their expertise and doing a deeper dive into hot topics or issues relevant to the industry.
The ‘Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast’ is the premiere podcast series from Energy Central, a Power Industry Network of Communities built specifically for professionals in the electric power industry and a place where professionals can share, learn, and connect in a collaborative environment. Supported by leading industry organizations, our mission is to help global power industry professionals work better. Since 1995, we’ve been a trusted news and information source for professionals working in the power industry, and today our managed communities are a place for lively discussions, debates, and analysis to take place. If you’re not yet a member, visit www.EnergyCentral.com to register for free and join over 200,000 of your peers working in the power industry.
The Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast is hosted by Jason Price, Community Ambassador of Energy Central. Jason is a Business Development Executive at West Monroe, working in the East Coast Energy and Utilities Group. Jason is joined in the podcast booth by the producer of the podcast, Matt Chester, who is also the Community Manager of Energy Central and energy analyst/independent consultant in energy policy, markets, and technology.
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