Geospatial world magazine gis electric utilities smart grid april 2015

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APRIL 2015 » VOLUME 05» ISSUE 09 | ISSN 2277–3134

Powering up

GRID 2.0 The electricity industry is undergoing a transformation. With utilities embracing geospatial technology and turning into data driven enterprises in the Smart Grid scenario, the sector is staring at an innovative future P | 22

Exclusive excerpt

Market Report

Geospatial Technology for Electricity Industry: Trends and Prospects P | 14

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Best Practices 25 – 29 MAY 2015, LISBON CONGRESS CENTRE, PORTUGAL

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Policies, technologies and applications are the three key factors influencing the growth of geospatial industry. INSPIRE-Geospatial World Forum endeavours to CONNECT the stakeholders – policy makers, technology providers and users–to evolve meaningful relationship for the larger benefit of all stakeholders. The conference also highlights the key and successful role of PPPs in enabling geospatial workflows.

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Trimble eGovernment Solutions C ON N E C T W I T H C OMM U NITY TO DAY, PL AN F O R TO MO RRO W

Cloud-based solutions for smarter cities We are all trying to do more with less. Looking for ways to make our cities smarter, more efficient—now and in the future.

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April 2015 • Vol 5 • Issue 9

Inside

Smart Grid and Geospatial Technology Interviews

20 GIS - A foundational technology

for electric utilities

Bill Meehan, P.E., Director Utility Solutions, Esri

Case Study

30 More power electric utilities Cover Story

Articles

22 Powering up Grid 2.0 with

Geospatial Technology

Geoff Zeiss, Editor - Building & Energy, Geospatial Media

36 A new frontier for asset location 40 Apptimising data management

44 UAVs: Innovative anti-poaching 14 G-Tech empowering electric utilities solution

Advisory Board

Disclaimer Geospatial World does not necessarily subscribe to the views expressed in the publication. All views expressed in this issue are those of the contributors. Geospatial World is not responsible for any loss to anyone due to the information provided.

Datuk Sr Ahmad Fauzi Bin Nordin

Dr Thomas Snitch, Senior Professor, Institute of Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland Owner, Publisher & Printer Sanjay Kumar Printed at M. P. Printers B - 220, Phase-II, Noida - 201 301, Gautam Budh Nagar (UP) India Publication Address A - 92, Sector - 52, Gautam Budh Nagar, Noida, India The edition contains 52 pages including cover

Derek Clarke

Director General of Survey and Mapping (JUPEM), Malaysia

Chief Director-Survey & Mapping & National Geospatial Information, Dept of Rural Development & Land Reform, South Africa

Aida Opoku-Mensah

Dorine Burmanje

Special Advisor: Post 2015 Development Agenda, UN Economic Commission for Africa

Chair-Executive Board, Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster), The Netherlands

Robert Sarfi, Managing Partner, Boreas Group LLC

34 Requisites for smooth functioning of utilities Stephen Brockwell, President, Brockwell IT

Regular Features

Market Report

Exclusive excerpt from the market report on Geospatial Technology for Electricity Industry: Trends & Prospects

28 ‘Way forward for electric utilities - Better data, better analytics and the ability to predict’

Prof. Josef Strobl Chair, Department of Geoinformatics, University of Salzburg, Austria

Kamal K Singh

7 Editorial 8 News 12 Vertical News 47 Product Watch Error: The article ‘Millions Vs Billions – The Google GeoBusiness Mantra’, published in Geospatial World March 2015 edition, has erroneously quoted Tony McEvoy from Australia as saying, “To our surprise, the Google partner/reseller also has no definitive answers.”

The error is regretted.

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Mohd Al Rajhi Asst Deputy Minister for Land & Surveying, Ministry of Municipal & Rural Affairs,Saudi Arabia

Sandeep Singhal

Chairman and CEO, Rolta Group

General Manager, Bing Maps and Geospatial, Microsoft

Ed Parsons

Kumar Navulur

Stephen Lawler

Geospatial Technologist, Google

Director, Next Generation Products, DigitalGlobe

Vice-President, Direct Traffic, Amazon

Dr Anne Kemp Director and Fellow, Atkins, Vice-Chair of BuildingSmart, UK, Chair of ICE BIM Action Group, Chair of BIM4Infrastructure UK

Mark Reichardt

Barbara Ryan Secretariat Director, Group on Earth Observations

CEO, Bentley Systems

President and CEO, Open Geospatial Consortium

Jay Freeland

Mladen Stojic

Greg Bentley

Christopher W Gibson Vice President & Executive Committee Member,Trimble

President & CEO, FARO

President, Hexagon Geospatial

Vanessa Lawrence President Secretary General, Ordnance Survey International, UK

CHAIRMAN M P Narayanan Publisher Sanjay Kumar Publications Team Managing Editor Prof. Arup Dasgupta Editor — Building & Energy Geoff Zeiss Editor — Mining (Hon) Dr. Hrishikesh Samant Editor ­— Policy Kevin Pomfret Editor — Latin America Dr Tania Maria Sausen Executive Editor Bhanu Rekha Product Manager Harsha Vardhan Madiraju Associate Editor Nitika Bajpayee Jha Assistant Editor Supreeth Sudhakaran Senior Graphic Designer Debjyoti Mukherjee Circulation Manager Ashish Batra Executive — Posting Vijay Kumar Singh

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 5

Cover photo courtesy: Siemens AG, Munich/Berlin

Perspective

With you all the way

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T O K YO · S A N F R A N C I S C O · M OS COW · ROT T E RDA M · BRI S BA NE

From the Editor’s Desk

Geospatial choices for sustainable future Prof Arup Dasgupta Managing Editor arup@geospatialmedia.net

T

he use of geospatial technologies for planning and management of utilities has been growing over the years. One of the most important of these is electrical power systems. In 2013, the use of electrical power in homes and industries accounted for over 23 thousand Tera Watt-hours out of the total energy use of nearly 159 thousand Tera Watt-hours. The growth of electrical energy demand shows a steep increase of 80% by 2040. As the world comes to grips with the challenges of global warming and climate change and moves towards a sustainable future, energy efficiency and the use of renewable resources will assume significance.

Geospatial technologies are playing and will continue to play a major role in the exploration and environmentally benign exploitation of non-renewable resources.

As these resources run out, the importance of renewable energy resources will rise and with it the use of geospatial technology for the siting of hydropower plants, wind farms, solar PE farms, geothermal resources and tidal power zones.

Power distribution is perhaps one of the areas where geospatial technologies have made significant contributions.

The integration of GIS with SCADA and ERP systems has brought in higher efficiencies by locating areas of power

loss, tailoring distribution in real time on demand, better planning of transmission and distribution lines and providing better management of power distribution assets.

A major disruption is the electrical power generation and distribution model has been brought about through solar PE and wind powered systems which are being set up by institutional and domestic consumers. Not only are such consumers becoming ‘power independent’, but are now in a position to actually feed back power to the grid and thus become distributed power producers and earn profit by selling power back to the power utilities.

Coping with these changes is proving to be a major challenge to the electrical power utilities. The use of geospatial systems to meet these changes requires that the industry look at geospatial systems in a holistic manner and adopt these for the specific use in their field. Vendors need to provide custom built solutions.

We see a need for the geospatial and electrical engineering professionals to work together to realise efficient and smarter systems which will ultimately please the consumers and improve the bottom line in terms of RoI.

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 7

Americas News Business FARO acquires ARAS 360 Technologies and Kubit FARO Technologies has acquired Germany-based company Kubit and British Columbia-based company ARAS 360 Technologies. Kubit is a developer of software for surveying and as-built documentation. The acquisition also includes substantially all of the assets of its US distributor Kubit USA. ARAS 360 Technologies, on the other hand, is involved in the development of accident and crime reconstruction, simulation and animation software.

Navman, Teletrac merge for asset tracking space Navman Wireless and Teletrac have merged to create a new telematics organisation. The combined company will be run by an executive management team selected from both Teletrac and Navman Wireless.

Bentley buys EADOC Cloud Services Bentley Systems has acquired California-based EADOC, provider of construction management cloud services. EADOC enables construction management professionals to track construction project documentation including design clarifications, inspectors’ daily reports, special inspections, memos, action items, deficiency items, and schedules.

Engility acquires TASC Engility Holdings has completed acquisition of TASC for approximately $1.3 billion. TASC is a provider of

8 / Geospatial World / April 2015

enterprise systems engineering, mission-enabling architectures and value-based solutions for the national security and public safety markets.

With this deal, TASC would enhance Engility’s existing Deal Value broad services offerings by adding capabilities in intelligence analysis, space systems architecture analysis, cyber forensics and cybersecurity, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations, geospatial intelligence and data analytics applications.

$1.3 bn

Orbital Insight raises $8.7 million of Series A funding Orbital Insight has partnered with Sequoia in a $8.7 million Series A round, with participation

by Bloomberg Beta, Google Ventures, citizen.vc and Lux Capital. The company uses image processing, neural networks, machine learning, and statistical analysis to glean valuable insights from satellite images for a customers such as hedge funds, real estate developers, insurance companies, government agencies, and environmental non-profit organisations.

Uber snaps deCarta to bolster its mapping arsenal Uber, the cab service provider, has acquired mapping and search startup deCarta for an undisclosed sum.

Uber revealed that it had acquired geospatial company deCarta that offers routing, mapping, geocoding and local search support. With deCarta on board, Uber is hoping

that the former's turn-by-turn navigation system and locationbased functionalities will aid it in improving its services.

Miscellaneous OGC, ILA to collaborate on indoor positioning Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and InLocation Alliance (ILA) have begun working together to advance indoor positioning capabilities. ILA has also signed a Liaison Agreement with OGC. The two organsations have been cooperating with each other for the past few years, and this agreement further extends the partnership.

Exelis to track drones with its new system Exelis has been working on launching low-altitude surveillance system for drones to aid the authorities in safeguarding the airspace. Exelis' products, called Symphony UAS-Vue and RangeVue, are significant because Exelis has the exclusive right to use a data feed it already supplies the FAA to track manned aircraft, using 650 ground stations. These stations will augment the feed with lower-altitude data that pinpoint drone locations.

Dr. Luis Bermudez is OGC new Executive Director Dr. Luis Bermudez has been appointed as the Executive Director of the OGC’s Compliance and e-learning programme. This programme is part of OGC’s Engineering Group, which also includes the OGC interoperability programme.

Europe News The Netherlands Topcon acquires Digi-Star Topcon Positioning Group has acquired Digi-Star. Based in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, Digi-Star is a global supplier of electronic equipment, precision sensors, optical yield and feed management sensors, displays, position verification, and software used by farmers and other equipment operators to precisely measure and analyse valuable data from critical farming processes. Both companies will benefit from the expanded product lines and solutions that progressive customers depend upon for maximum profitability.

Belgium EuroGeographics, EuroSDR partner for spatial data EuroGeographics and EuroSDR have announced that they will work together to provide a framework for European spatial data research and development. The cooperation agreement will further develop the EuroSDR Research Plan and the activities of the EuroGeographics Knowledge Exchange Networks. As a result, members of both not-forprofit organisations will be able to take part in joint projects and hand over tasks more appropriate to the other organisation’s expertise.

ESA-Airbus join hands for EDRS services Following the recent decision confirming the ESA-Airbus Defence and Space European Data Relay System (ERDS) partnership, agreement has been reached with the European Commis-

sion (EU) for the provision of EDRS services to the EU Copernicus programme. A related service contract has been signed between ESA and Airbus Defence and Space, securing EDRS services to the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 dedicated missions, starting in 2015 until 2021, with an option for extension until 2028. EDRS will provide near-real-time data transfer from earth observation satellites, drones or aircraft to earth via geostationary communication satellites.

UK Nigel Clifford appointed as CEO of Ordnance Survey Britain’s Business Minister, Matthew Hancock, recently announced the appointment of Nigel Clifford as the new Chief Executive of Ordnance Survey (OS). Nigel will take up leadership of the £145 million turnover organisation in June, bringing extensive experience of international software, telecoms and services including complex joint venture and public sector enterprises. Nigel will also lead OS into a new era as a governmentowned company and an exciting future of innovation and partnerships at the heart of the geospatial information sector.

Agreement signed for Sentinel data access ESA and the UK signed an Understanding for the Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment Cooperation at an event at ESA’s Headquarters in Paris. The agreement aims to facilitate Sentinel data exploitation in the country. The UK Space Agency will coordinate ground

Image: Signature of ESA

segment activities in the UK – such as hosting, distributing, ensuring access and archiving Sentinel data – and act as an interface between ESA and national initiatives.

Portugal INSPIRE GWF 2015 programme announced INSPIRE-Geospatial World Forum 2015, scheduled to be held May 25-29, 2015 in Lisbon, will feature four plenary sessions, and an exclusive ministerial panel. The first line-up of the conference’s keynote speakers includes: Karl Falkenberg, Director General of European Commission, DG Environment, Dorine Burmanje, Chair of Executive Board, Dutch Kadaster, Vladimir Šucha, Director General, Joint Research Centre, Michael Howell, Deputy Program Manager, Information Sharing Environment, United States Government; industry leaders: Steven W. Berglund, President, Chief Executive Officer, Trimble, Raymond O’ Connor, Chief Executive Officer, Topcon, Ola Rollen, CEO, Hexagon among others.

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 9

Asia Pacific News Vietnam

The data will be available on data.wa.gov.au, and the policy mandates that it (data) should be published with a high level of granularity, and not in aggregate or modified forms. Data will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution by default.

Cooperation agreement signed with Japan The Vietnam Department of Survey and Mapping (VDSM) and the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI) recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Hanoi to commit to collaborative efforts in various projects. Both sides agreed to focus on establishing a legal framework for cartography and a geospatial database, developing fundamental infrastructures for surveying services and the GNSS, building the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) and using geospatial information to reduce the impact of natural disasters.

India Rolta, Hitachi India sign strategic collaboration MoU Rolta India and Hitachi India have signed an MoU for jointly addressing significant market opportunities in high-growth business segments in India. The companies will work closely together to explore strategic business collaborations for infrastructure systems in large markets, to offer comprehensive and seamlessly integrated solutions.

Japan Philippines to help check typhoon damage Researchers in Japan have teamed up with the government of the Philippines to develop satellites that can examine the damage caused by typhoons and massive rainstorms in

10 / Geospatial World / April 2015

the Southeast Asian nation with an accuracy of 5 metres. The project, estimated to cost 800 million yen ($6.66 million), will see both the satellites being put in orbit by 2017.

Russia Embezzlement in GLONASS: Report filed

China is set to launch its first overseas satellite data receiving station in the Arctic. The station, which is expected to start operation in the next two years, will be established in Sweden and cover information in the Arctic region and Europe. Experts say the station will enable China to obtain satellite remote sensing data for research on country's environmental conditions, resource distribution, and global climate change.

Russia’s Investigative Committee (SK) has completed a criminal investigation of financial machinations during the construction of facilities for the GLONASS navigation system within a federal programme in the Moscow region. There are five defendants in the case, and the amount of damage has been assessed at $4.25 million. Charges of embezzlement and overstating the work costs have been brought against the suspects.

The facility was supposed to hold equipment for collecting and processing the data supplied by the GLONASS global network.

Australia

KOMPSAT-3A launched

China Sat-data receiving station to be set-up in Arctic

Western Australia releases open data policy Western Australia has released the draft of its open data policy, urging agencies to be “open by default”.

The policy states that there should be no or minimal cost to agencies in making data open and giving people access to data. However, it adds that if there are “significant collection and maintenance costs”, agencies can consider charging a fee for the data.

KOMPSAT-3A was recently launched in space from Yasny Launch Base, Russia.

The prime goal of the KOMPSAT-3A programme is to obtain imagery for GIS applications related to environment, agriculture, oceanographic studies as well as natural disasters using its 5.5m resolution IR sensor and 0.55m high resolution EO. KOMPSAT-3A has been designed and built by Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), a government-funded research institute located in Daejeon, South Korea.

Africa News Congo Large-scale changes in Africa's climate mapped An international research team, led by the University of Leicester has mapped the entire African continent — south of the Sahara — for geographical changes. Together with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the Institute of Electromagnetic Sensing of Environment of the National Research Council of Italy, and the Polish Institute of Geodesy and Cartography, analysed 10 years of satellite data. The researchers observed that areas such as the Congo, Nigeria and Madagascar now receive far less rainfall than they did until a decade

ago, while other locations such as the Sahel zone have become greener as a result of increased rainfall.

Burkina Faso IGN France International updates national base map IGN France International has updated the national base map of Burkina Faso. The project was awarded to the company in 2011, and was funded by the European Union under its 10th European Development Fund.

Completed between 2011 and 2015, this project involved in the creation of 34 topographic maps at a scale of 1:200,000 as well as the updating of the national topographic database.

The previous base map had not been

updated since the 1950’s and did not reflect any longer the changes that have occurred in Burkina in the recent years.

Rwanda National Land Use Planning Portal launched The Government of Rwanda has launched its National Land Use Planning Portal (NLUPP) to give its citizens easy access to land-use plans and other spatial data on the web.

Built on Esri's ArcGIS platform by the Rwanda Natural Resources Authority, with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), NLUPP is the first portal of its kind on the continent of Africa.

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 11

Vertical Focus

AGRI BlackBridge partners with FarmLogs BlackBridge has partnered with FarmLogs, a farm management software and data-science company, to provide satellite imagery for crop health and field performance analysis in US markets. Through the partnership, FarmLogs will leverage BlackBridge’s Monitoring Program for Agriculture over the US, with access to five-metre, multispectral RapidEye satellite imagery collected on a frequent basis throughout the growing season, as well as more than six years of historical imagery.

UH Hilo collaborates on state-wide agricultural survey The Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA) is collaborating with the University of Hawaii at Hilo on a state-wide agricultural survey to provide a digital depiction of the 2015 agricultural footprint of the state. The project will include mapping current agricultural activity, as well as water systems and irrigation options available to farmers

and ranchers. The mapping work is being done within the UH Hilo Spatial Data Analysis and Visualization Laboratory (SDAV), drawing upon the lab staff’s expertise in GIS and analysis of remotely sensed data, including Google Earth, to help in digitising active crop and ranching areas.

India mulls digital mapping of farms for crop insurance The Indian government is preparing to deploy orbiting satellites to digitally map each farmland in the country, the data from which will be used to provide tailor-made crop insurance cover to farmers. A proposal in this regard is being discussed with the insurance regulator, Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDA). The idea is to digitally map all of India’s farming plots using GPS readings and offer farmers yield-based insurance products, which will cover their individual risks. At present, crop insurance mainly covers the loans taken by a farmer and not his farming activities.

INFRA Trimble acquires Linear Project Trimble recently acquired privately-held Linear Project, a provider of scheduling software for linear infrastructure projects. Linear Project’s TILOS time and location planning software is used worldwide and is ideal for highways, railways, pipelines, tunnels, water engineering, transmission line construction and other linear civil engineering projects.

TILOS software merges both the location and the schedule into one combined time and distance graphical view that changes dynamically as conditions change.

CII, Hitachi, Siemens sign MoU for smart city initiative In the first step towards implementation of Indian government’s plan to build 100 smart cities, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) recently inked pacts with global technology firms Siemens and Hitachi. Under the agreement, the industry consortium will spearhead the conceptualisation and implementation of pilot projects in smart cities. CII has set up a ‘National Mission on Smart Cities’, a consortium comprising industry leaders and

12 / Geospatial World / April 2015

experts to provide policy guidelines and thought leadership to government and other stakeholders.

Wates sets three-year BIM target Wates is targeting using BIM on two thirds of its £10 million plus projects within three years, the contracproject value tor’s group design director Andrew Barraclough has revealed. Barraclough said Wates was on course to comply with the government’s requirement of delivering BIM level two on all centrally-procured public projects from next year. Wates has “made progression in the last seven years on BIM”, Barraclough said, and is now using advanced forms of BIM on a number of projects.

£10 mn

Dubai RTA adopts BIM solutions The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) of Dubai, UAE has launched a new building information modelling (BIM) solution, which aims at dealing with asset information in a comprehensive manner starting from the design stage.

ENERGY

Avantha Group bags Saudi Arabia’s smart grid contract

Avantha Group Company, CG, has been awarded a contract worth € 3.4 million by Saudi Electricity Company (SEC), the largest power utility company in the Middle East, to supply ZIV three phase smart meters. Interoperability, remote management and accuracy are the three key features of these smart meters that will be connected to current transformers and will communicate via a modem (GPRS). The segment of small-commerce end users will be the first ones to have the meters replaced by the new smart meters. Successive contracts are expected to be awarded in the short-run.

Enel to invest £5.4 billion in clean power and smart grids Enel energy is planning to invest about €18 billion in renewable energy and smart grid markets in the coming five years.

Out of this, nearly €5.4 billion will be invested in emerging markets, digital meters and smart grids all over the world. Enel is aiming to increase its renewable energy capacity by 50% to 7.1GW mostly in Latin America, North America and Africa.

Esri, EPRI co-develop outage data platform Esri and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) recently announced a Common Information Model (CIM) for software providers and electric utilities that would help foster power restoration after storms. The CIM ensures all stakeholders have the same information regarding the location and the number of outages. Esri and EPRI demonstrated their initial results recently at DistribuTECH, the annual event for electric power transmission and distribution.

Lockheed, Dominion unveil VirtuGrid Lockheed Martin and Dominion Resources have co-developed a new Smart Grid technology called VirtuGrid, which will enable remote detection of power outages for faster mapping and response. VirtuGrid enables data, including voltage, power, energy readings, GPS location, phase and circuit connectivity, to be sent from the remote location to the substation over the same path as the power. It also facilitates control and timing of remote communications with multiple types of communication networks with very low bandwidth usage.

LAND N.Korean cadastral maps to be digitised The South Korea government is mulling over to digitise over 300,000 cadastral maps of North Korea for permanent storage, which it has kept since the division of the peninsula in 1953. The aim is to prevent disputes and confusion over land ownership in the event of reunification. These maps were made during the Japanese colonial period from 1910 to 1918. The ministry believes the project will have significant economic and security value as a combination of digitalised cadastral maps and satellite images will make it much easier to establish the lay of the land.

New system to help verify land titles in Philippines The Land Registration Authority (LRA), in a circular posted on its official website has said that it will soon implement a trace-

back feature for its automated land titling system, allowing users to identify computerised records that were issued prior to the current title and verify property records’ authenticity.

However, the circular added that the trace-back shall be based only on the existing title information in the computerized database.

Indian state launches its e-registry system The Haryana state government in India recently inaugurated an e-registry system for registration of lands through video conferencing from the Chandigarh secretariat. The system is available throughout Panchkula district, including sub-divisions of Kalka, Barwala, Raipurani and Morni. For this purpose a total of three counters, including an enquiry window, have been set up.

On these windows, an individual can submit documents related to registry of their property. If anyone wants to register a land on the same day, he will have to pay a fee of Rs 5,000/10,000/20,000 depending on the land’s value.

The scheme has been launched to ensure proper record of accounts and to curb corruption.

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 13

Electricity / Market Report

G-tech Empowering Electric Utilities Here’s an exclusive excerpt from Geospatial Media’s market report on Geospatial Technology for Electricity Industry: Trends and Prospects

A

ccording to International Energy Agency (IEA), the world electricity demand is projected to increase by 80% during the period 2012-2040. The power sector represents over half of the increase in global primary energy use — a rise comparable to the current North American total energy demand. Non-OECD countries, however, account for the bulk of incremental electricity demand led by China, India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

The major drivers contributing to this growth is increasing demand, universal access, decarbonising electric power, reducing revenue losses, and grid reliability and resilience.

Some of the technologies contributing to this transformation include intelligent devices integrated with a packet-switched

14 / Geospatial World / April 2015

communications network (Smart Grid), distributed renewable power generation, energy efficient buildings, and micro grids.

How much foothold a particular technology would gain in a given sector in future depends a lot on where that sector is headed to which in turn can be represented by the present focus of organisations in that sector. For example, if the electricity sector is completely focussed on exploiting the renewables now, it implies that the future holds great potential for technologies which assist in mapping the renewable potential, renewable plants planning, transmission capacity build-up etc. It is great news for stakeholders offering technological solutions relevant to these fields. The report

“Geospatial Technology for Electricity Industry: Trends and Prospects” by Geospatial Media and Communications indicates the organisational priorities. The report highlights how network expansion and automation would occupy the largest mindshare for electric utilities. Adding renewable to the total generation or supply mix seems to get a good share of emphasis among the stakeholders in this sector.

For the first time in 100 years, the electric power utility business is undergoing a momentous change.

Distributed renewable power generation, especially solar photovoltaics (PV), is introducing competition into an industry that has been managed as regulated monopolies. Consumers with solar PV panels on their roofs are fundamentally changing the traditional utility business model. Disruptive challenges that threaten to force electric utilities to change or adapt the business model have arisen due to a number of factors, including the falling costs of distributed generation such as solar PV, demand-side management technologies (DSM), government programmes to incentivise solar PV and other technologies; and the very low price of natural gas. The financial risks for utilities created by these disruptive challenges go to the very core of how the electric power grid is financed and include declining utility revenues, increasing costs, and lower profitability.

Smart Grid

As a result, every aspect of the utility industry is experiencing fundamental transformation. One of these changes involves the role that geospatial data and technology play in the electricity industry. Until the advent of the Smart Grid, geospatial technology has been applied tactically — it was (and still is) used in a variety of applications — in outage management, asset management, mobile workforce management, energy density modelling, vegetation management, demand modelling, transmission line siting, substation siting and design, energy performance modelling of buildings, disaster management, and mapping renewable resources, to name just a few. Most utilities are in the midst of deploying Smart Grids, which basically amounts to applying the internet to the electric power grid to link intelligent electronic devices, sensors and grid control applications to enable data-driven decision making. One of the

Priorities for electric utilities (worldwide)

10%

Smart Grid

Capacity Addition

7%

15%

Renewable

22%

Automation

13%

Network Loss reduction

20%

Network Expansion

13%

Increasing Electricity Procurement

most important changes driven by the implementation of Smart Grid is the greater importance of location. Geospatial technology — location, geospatial data management and spatial analytics — is seen as foundational technology for the Smart Grid.

The survey conducted by Geospatial Media and Communications highlighted that geospatial has been widely used by utilities for years for automated mapping/facilities management, back office records management, asset management, transmission line siting, and more recently for design and construction, energy conservation, vegetation management, Mobile Workforce Management (MWFM), and Outage Management (OMS). Now, utilities are integrating GIS with Automated Meter Infrastructure (AMI) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.

Intelligent design has crossed over from the office to the field in utilities, also enabled by the capabilities of GIS. Geospatial-related analytics (spatial analytics) is seen as one of the key aspects of success for electric utility operations in the Smart Grid era. Looking for patterns and correlations between different land, weather, terrain, assets, and other types of geodata will be increasingly important for utilities. Power-related analytics with geospatial components include network fault tracing, load flow analysis, Volt/VAR analysis, real-time

Intregration of Geospatial with Business Processes of Electric Utilities

35%

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)

85%

Distribution Management System (DMS)

53%

Workforce Management System (WMS)

57%

Outage Management System (OMS)

15%

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 15

Electricity / Market Report disaster situational awareness, condition-based maintenance, and vegetation management. The Smart Grid is all about situation awareness and effective anticipation of and response to events that might disrupt the performance of the power grid. Since spatial data underlies everything an electric utility does, GIS can link every operational activity of an electric utility, including design and construction, asset management, workforce management, and outage management as well as automated meter infrastructure, (SCADA), distribution management systems (DMSs), renewables, and strategic planning.

Different geospatial technologies find usage in different areas of planning and operations for the electricity organisations. Some of the players, who have recently implemented geospatial technologies are using them for tactical operations while the more astute and advanced users have gradually shifted to using it for strategic decision-making as well. Geospatial has played an important role in streamlining the processes and assisted in a wide range of day-to-day business decisions.

At present, records management and asset management are the most common usages for a typical distribution utility followed by network monitoring.

Geospatial data and technology, including big spatial data, spatial analytics, visualisation and simulation, have become critical for the modern data-driven smart utility. The volume of data generated by Smart Grid networks is estimated to be ten thousand times greater than that of our existing electrical networks. The exploding number and variety of smart devices and sensors is generating exponentially increasing volumes of real-time data, most of which includes location that requires real-time big data analytics to turn the data deluge into actionable information. Added to the challenge that utilities are experiencing is increasing volumes of structured and unstructured data that is overwhelming traditional enterprise systems. The structured data comes from smart meters, intelligent electronic devices, and the unstructured data from social networks including Twitter, Google, Facebook and other social applications.

The consumerisation of geospatial technology in smart phones (all GPS-enabled sensors) will enable crowd-sourcing of all

sorts of information about electric power networks most of which involves location. Geographic location is a foundational technology for Grid 2.0 because location is a fundamental index for organising this data — things that are geographically proximal to each other tend to affect each other. Predictive analytics, analysing structured and unstructured data sources to uncover patterns in the data that can be used to identify issues before they occur is a growing area but this will require high performance computing to enable it to be applied to its full potential.

The increasing penetration of this technology into Smart Grid workflow applications, such as Mobile Workforce Management (MWFM), Distribution Management System (DMS), Energy Management Systems (EMS), Outage Management System (OMS), Customer Information Systems (CIS), and analytics will be the primary driver for electric utility GIS software and services growth.

Energy Efficient Buildings

Buildings account for 32% of the world’s total final energy consumption. The demand for energy by buildings is expected to grow the fastest of all the sectors (transportation, industry) during the next three decades. The pattern of energy consumption in developed countries is expected to remain largely unchanged, but in non-OECD economies, it is likely to undergo great changes. These economies are expected to represent nearly 80% of the total additional demand from the buildings sector. With improved living standards, the demand of energy in these countries for lighting, space heating and cooling, entertainment and other energy-appliances will witness a huge boost. Along with the increased demand from household, the increased economic activities would also push the demands from commercial and service sectors. The rate of growth in OECD countries is estimated at 0.7%, while for the non-OECD countries it is expected to be around 2.6%.

Geospatial and BIM are essential for energy performance modelling which is a fundamental instrument for reducing the energy consumption and improving the energy performance of new and existing buildings. Currently, the primary motivation for energy performance modelling for buildings is the

Usage of Geospatial Technologies (Worldwide)

16%

16%

Transition Demand Towards Response Smart Grid Management

22% 14%

Utility Analytics

16 / Geospatial World / April 2015

Advanced Metering Infrastructure

70% 42%

41%

84%

29%

Workforce Network Network Asset Reporting to Management Modelling Monitoring Management Regulators

89%

Records Management

Factors Driving the Adoption of Geospatial Technologies (Worldwide)

54%

Potential for Reduction in Operations Cost

89%

Operational Complexities

68%

Potential for Reduction in Project Cost

84%

Improving Consumer Experience

53%

Market Competition

34%

Regulatory Requirements

aggressive building codes that push energy efficiency. Other motivations are customer-driven certification such as LEED and other “green� certification and financial incentives from local governments and power utilities to reduce energy consumption, peak load or both. Measures aimed at improving the efficiency of buildings have been introduced in Europe, the US and Japan. Zero Energy Buildings (ZEB) are loosely defined as buildings that generate as much energy as they consume.

Reducing Commercial Losses

According to the World Bank, the total commercial losses in electric power in 2011 were nearly 1.78 trillion KWh, which roughly translates to 9% of the total net generation in that year.

These problems are more rampant and pronounced in the developing and underdeveloped countries as opposed to the advanced countries. In 2011, the total technical and non-technical loss in the US was around 6%, whereas the figure for India was close to 27%. Reining in non-technical losses is one of the most imposing challenges that distribution companies around the world are faced with in today’s time. Using GIS systems, combined with smart meters, have now made it very easy to spot any leakage/theft in the network.

Factors Driving The Adoption of Geospatial Technologies

The electricity sector is a multi-dimensional realm and a single approach cannot comprehend it. The dynamics of sector varies from country to country depending on the governance style, sectoral usage, level of maturity, future directions etc., The forces of competition define implementation of geospatial technologies in the open market countries while the policy guidelines of the Government shape the contours of government controlled companies. We have adequately

Benefits of using Geospatial Technology (worldwide)

78% Improved Customer Service 14% Efficient Project Management 42% Higher Transparency 72% Better Network Monitoring 41% Reduced Network Downtime 63% Improved Efficiency 80% Better Management of Complex Operations 66% Improved Decision Making covered both ends of the market structure and the spaces in between to gauge the most important factors guiding the implementation of geospatial technologies in the electricity sector. Of all the factors handling operation complexities is one of the major factors that has led electric utilities to opt for geospatial technologies. Huge service areas, large workforce, repair & maintenance, optimum and timely generation of work order, monitoring etc. takes a big toll on the management. But aided with accurate network visualisation and location awareness, electric utilities stand to benefit greatly from geospatial technologies. Improving the consumer experience turned out to be the second most important factor favouring the adoption of geospatial technologies.

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 17

Electricity / Market Report ORGANISATIONAL CHALLENGES 10% 14%

35%

15%

26%

Value Proposition

Our survey reveals that electric utilities across the world have benefitted from geospatial technology. It has vastly improved the management of their complex operations, improved customer service and helped them monitor the network better.

Better network monitoring, improved decision making, efficiency and reduced network downtime have been cited by the electric utilities as other significant benefits of the technology.

Challenges in Implementing Geospatial Technology Clarity with regards to geospatial strategy Lack of geospatial expertise among the workforce Lack of sufficient financial resources Unclear/frequently changing project scope Lack of awareness of geospatial technology in the senior management

DATA RELATED CHALLENGES 19%

28%

21% 32% Cost of data acquistion Data quality Volume of data Data format compatibility

VENDOR RELATED CHALLENGES 18% 42%

19% 21%

Lack of understanding of end-users’ business practices Actual project cost higher than anticipated L ess-than-satisfying support after implementation Product quality not at par with the expectation

18 / Geospatial World / April 2015

The challenges have been categorised under three groups as organisational, data-related and vendor-related. Lack of a geospatial strategy from the top management and shortage of geospatial expertise among the workforce are seen as the most critical among all the organisational challenges in the electricity sector. Among others, lack of financial resources, frequently changing project requirements and lack of awareness about geospatial technologies in the senior management were seen as major problems.

Among the data-related challenges faced by the players in the electricity sector during the geospatial implementation, the most critical challenges according to our respondents are data quality, cost of data acquisition, volume of data and format compatibility. Respondents reported that vendor related problems were common during and after the implementation of geospatial technologies in the electricity utilities. Less-than-satisfying experience not only leads to suboptimal results from the implementation of geospatial technologies, but also affects the confidence of end users of the technology, thereby hurting the long-term business prospects of the geospatial industry as a whole.

The Way Forward

The present uptake level of geospatial technology in the electricity utilities is mostly limited to being a record keeping and network visualisation tool and is used for tactical operations. However, Smart Grid will drive geospatial technologies beyond this tactical level of usage to become a foundation technology supporting utilities not just in the day-to-day operations, but also in their strategic decision-making process.

This is an excerpt from the report “Geospatial Technology for Electricity Industry: Trends and Prospects�

by Geospatial Media. A part of global scenario is presented in this article. The full report contains inter alia the assessment of the trends and opportunities for geospatial technology in electricity at regional level.

For more details or to buy the report contact anamika@geospatialmedia.net.

Electricity / Perspective

GIS - A foundational technology for electric utilities

Utilities need to be proficient in providing the service quickly; and geospatial technology could assure that Talking about how utility industry thrives on geospatial technology, Bill Meehan, P.E., Director Utility Solutions, Esri highlights the role of GIS in eradicating communication flaws in the sector 20 / Geospatial World / April 2015

T

hink utility, especially the electricity sector and a great scope for geospatial technology comes to the forefront. There are application areas in the sector where geospatial technology can provide greatest benefits. The main, out of these, would be the sharing of information across the entire organisation. One of the major issues that the utility companies face is the lack of communication, mainly because they operate in silos.

The structural dynamics of people working in the utility sector make it difficult for them to communicate effectively.

In most cases, utility companies use paper maps, wherein

it’s difficult to communicate the maps are static, and hardly leave any room to get into the details of the information and share the same with colleagues at a distance. Here, arrives the need to share the same kind of information and instructions to operate well. To improve operation of utilities, there is also a need to have a collaborative environment.

Information is the key to good decision making, and the fundamental improvement we could see.

Foundational technology

Many believe that Smart Grid will make geospatial a foundational technology for electric power utility. Smart Grid, however, has many different meanings. Smart Grid is more like ‘internet of things’. In another words, Smart Grid is going to channelise communication by allowing more and more people and devices to communicate across the platform.

Smart Grid is like Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), where each customer has smart meters. Imagine a Smart Grid to have the ability to put together those meters and Smart Grid sensors that can help optimise the performance of electric system by minimising loss or improving the voltage profile. It is about modernising the electric system by using information coming from real time sensors or historical real time data with a location aspect to it. But then, you also think of things like predictive information which talks of — what might happen? A good example of what might happen is a flood. A flood might happen in the area for which you look at measures and for that the information is required from various sources like sensors, DMS and AMI. If all information is put together, forecasted data is available. All these data — complete with location and authority — can give predictive information on what might happen. This is what smart utility would see in coming days. Not just AMI or power indicator, but through putting it all together in a well coordinated way. This is also the essence of big data — the data coming from different sources in a structured way.

Challenges at large

Utilities today are facing several challenges. When put authoritative, predicted, measured data along with the vast data available from the web — organised by location (in the GIS of course), patterns and trends with one or two elements alone are discovered. Spatial technology helps utilities in being proactive, instead of reactive since patterns and trends are visualised clearly in the form of a map.

Talking about challenges, the greatest of challenge for the geospatial industry is articulating the value of geospatial technology in comparison to other things that utilities can do.

For instance — if a utility is feeling the pressure to reduce cost, they may try to reduce their GIS programme. Getting utilities to see the value of GIS, not just in terms of having good maps — which is valuable to some extent — but it’s up to the geospatial industry to be able to articulate in much concrete way the value of GIS in these areas. One should be increasing the revenue or reducing cost of operation, particularly in delivery side of the business of transmission and distribution. Here, it’s increasing the efficiency of the crews and getting information back from the field; understanding where materials/equipment would fail and predicting that well in advance. So, this is the area of increasing revenue and lowering cost.

Service is the key

Another area that is keeping customers engaged and happy is quick service. Utilities need to be proficient in providing the service quickly, and geospatial technology is one way that could assure that. Another part of customer satisfaction would be the ability to know outages and to understand their nature.

Getting employee’s information is also essential. They need a collaborative platform with all stakeholders involved like customers, regularisers, media and the first responder for emergencies to get that collaboration. This platform of collaboration in place is really a true value of GIS and the geospatial community.

Being able to improve the customer community, community awareness, reputation with-in the community - that usually implies like compliance, safety and not having accidents is the fourth critical area. Often, community information is location-based. Phrases such as — where our customers are really unhappy; where our communities are looking for improvement; where the complaints coming from the public utility commission; where are the compliance issues – all location specific. So, first of all we have to make sure that the utility industry really articulates the value of this technology.

The way forward

So, how does GIS provide the biggest bang in a shortterm for the electric utilities? Well, this can be done by eliminating mistakes and breaking down barriers throughout the organisation. The classic situation would be getting spatial information into the field; into the hands of the people who are in the streets. Until you collaborate between the office — the engineers, operators and the field workers — some misunderstandings and lack of communication will come up. Getting that fixed is probably the biggest bang of the buck. Once that is done, a platform is ready to be built.

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 21

Cover Story/ Smart Grid

powering up Grid 2.0 with Geospatial TECHNOLOGY The electricity industry is undergoing a transformation. With utilities embracing geospatial technology and turning into data driven enterprises in the Smart Grid scenario, the sector is staring at an innovative future, suggests Geoff Zeiss, Editor – Building and Energy

22 / Geospatial World / April 2015

The National Academy of Engineering, US, identifies the electric power grid as the first of 20 major engineering achievements that has the greatest impact on the quality of life in the 20th century. Modern society has reached a point, where virtually every crucial economic and social function depends on the secure, reliable operation of electric power infrastructure. The electric power infrastructure provides immense societal benefits, but because it has become so crucial for modern life, challenges are aplenty.

T

he electric power industry is undergoing a major transformation. Increasing demand, universal access, decarbonising electric power, reducing revenue loss, and grid reliability and resilience drive this fundamental change. Technologies contributing to this transformation include intelligent devices integrated with a communications network, distributed renewable power generation, especially wind and solar PV, net zero energy buildings, microgrids, and new remote sensing technologies of sub-surface utility engineering.

Many utilities are in the midst of transforming themselves into data driven enterprises. Recently, International Data Corporation (IDC) published its future predictions for the development of the electric power industry for period 2015-2018. For many in the industry, the predictions are quite startling and clearly reflect a fast-evolving industry.

Smart Grid

The technology roadmap for the Smart Grid involves deployment of several intelligent electronic devices for sensing and control. The challenge, however, is in federating the data from these devices, extracting information and dispatching the information to the right control devices. The exercise requires a common semantic model, such as the Common Information Model (CIM), cybersecurity and analytics to extract information from the huge volume of data collected from the sensors. According to Navigant Research, the market for Smart Grid technologies will reach $73 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2020.

According to a survey conducted by Geospatial World of its readers, about 97% of respondents found interoperability the most important factor in making geospatial/GIS software purchasing decisions Smart Grid and Geospatial data and technology

As per the forecasts by Navigant Research, the increasing penetration of GIS into Smart Grid workflow applications such as Mobile Workforce Management (MWFM), Distribution Management System (DMS), Energy Management Systems (EMS), Outage Management System (OMS), Customer Information Systems (CIS), and analytics will be primary drivers for electric utility GIS software and service growth. Navigant forecasts that the utility GIS market will grow at an annual rate of 12.8%, a neat increase from $1.8 billion in 2011 to $3.7 billion in 2017.

Many existing applications used by utilities rely on proprietary software and represent information silos.

Integrating these systems with new Smart Grid applications will be a major challenge over the next few years. As per IDC predictions, utilities will invest over a quarter of their IT budgets on integrating new technologies with legacy enterprise systems in 2015.

Looking at the current scenario of electric power industry and the changes it is undergoing, geospatial is poised to become a foundation technology for Smart Grid, so sees Navigant. The role of utility GIS is expected to touch

Predictions by IDC

60%

• Cloud - By 2018, cloud services will make up half of the IT portfolio for over of utilities.

• Integration - In 2015, utilities will invest over a quarter of their IT budgets on integrating new technologies with legacy enterprise systems.

• Analytics - By 2017, about 45% of utilities’ new investment in analytics will be used in operations and maintenance of plant and network infrastructure.

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 23

Cover Story/ Smart Grid

every aspect of a utilities business, affecting its customers, operations and management. As Robert Sarfi says (see his interview on page 28 ), geospatial is the logical technology that can provide the basis for integrating data from the information silos associated with proprietary applications.

The importance of geospatial in the new world of Smart Grid is reinforced by John McDonald, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), which maintains a Catalogue of Standards for Smart Grid standards in the United States. McDonald firmly believes that geospatial information is a foundational platform for Smart Grid. SGIP has even signed a

The technology roadmap for the Smart Grid involves deployment of several intelligent electronic devices for sensing and control 24 / Geospatial World / April 2015

Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Open Geospatial Consortium to ensure that SGIP’s Smart Grid standards incorporate OGC geospatial standards.

Geospatial technologies in the Smart Grid era

Real-time, big spatial data The volume of data generated by Smart Grid networks is estimated to be 10,000 times greater than the existing electrical networks. The exploding number and a variety of smart devices and sensors is generating exponentially increasing volumes of real-time data, most of which includes location, that requires real-time big spatial data analytics to turn the data deluge into actionable information.

Geoff Cameron, Executive Vice President, AGSI points out that providing real-time access to all operational data in a geospatial context is the foundation upon which analytics in a Smart Grid world needs to be built.

Burlington Hydro (BHI) is an example of an early adopter of Smart Grid technology. BHI’s challenge was to integrate their Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, 65,000 smart meters reporting power use every 15 minutes the supporting Automated Meter Infrastructure (AMI), intelligent devices, power line sensors, a Customer Information System (CIS), their ERP system, engineering analysis, and other systems. The system had

larger data volumes to handle, something that BHI had never experienced before.

BHI’s solution provides a scalable, geospatial solution built on open-service oriented web architecture. A web browser, either on the desktop or on a mobile device, is all that is required to access tools for asset maintenance, cable locate, asset management, operations, financials and drill downs, automating network pinning and work protection tagging, SCADA, schematic views, automated CAIDI, SAIDI and SAIFI reporting, the outage management system (OMS), mobile workforce automation, automated as-built management, real-time asset monitoring and analytics, and an executive dashboard.

Standards for interoperability

According to a survey conducted by Geospatial World of its readers, about 97% of respondents found interoperability an important factor in making geospatial/GIS software purchasing decisions. Interoperability is so important for the Smart Grid that utilities are taking the development of standards to ensure interoperability into their own hands. Traditional utility applications are very often silos surrounding proprietary hardware, telecommunications and software applications. Duke Energy, CPS Energy and 25 vendors, called the Coalition of the Willing (COW) have just embarked on an implementation of an open standards-based architecture with the goal to enable interoperability among products from different vendors.

In the electric power sector, the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) and the OGC have signed a MoU to work together on integrating geospatial with Smart Grid standards. As an example, The MultiSpeak standard, which was developed for electric distribution utilities by National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) incorporates the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) 2.1.2 standard for geospatial location.

Data quality

One of the contributing reasons for poor outage statistics (CAIDI, SAIDI) in many jurisdictions is that many do not have accurate information about the location of their facilities, especially that of underground facilities. Cable locate services for construction projects is a major cost for many utilities for the same reason. Smart Grid is forcing utilities to address the issue of reliable geolocation of utility infrastructure.

Stephen Brockwell from Brockwell IT Consulting is convinced that utilities are aware of the issue of poor data quality and understand that something needs to be done to reap the true benefits of Smart Grid. He predicts that utilities will adopt a new approach using new technology, including

Utilities can quantitatively monitor storm impact on infrastructure like transformers in real-time and by using geofences to setup alerts for lightning strikes reality capture and 3D modelling to improve information about the location of their infrastructure. Speaking about the scenario, Brockwell suggests, “I don’t know of a utility that doesn’t understand that at this point. Recently, when I met city planners from a medium-sized municipality, they talked of a massive backlog problem. Their location data for as-builts is becoming increasingly out-of-date because they don’t have the resources in place to keep up. The good news is that every single person in the room knew they simply had no choice, but to address the gap. The metrics for old-school migration no longer makes sense. The quality management programmes are too intensive and the duration of such projects puts too much risk on an organisation. Too many critical resources are pulled off for too long. I think it is not impossible that, in the not-too-distant future, a municipality will use one of the numerous partners out there to skip 2D data capture altogether—we’re almost at the point where it would be cheaper to scan all the facilities than it would be to embark on an old-fashioned off-shore 2D scanning and

Utilities are applying spatial analytics for – • Reducing non-technical losses • Targeting demand responses • Distribution of operations planning • Transformer load management • Data quality • Voltage correlation ie linking meters to transformers • Energy modelling • Voltage deviation monitoring • Geographical outage frequency analysis • Predictive analytics for electric vehicle adoption

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 25

Cover Story/ Smart Grid

Mining social media

Social media such as Twitter and Facebook are being used extensively to assist electric utilities to search, review, and plot social media traffic when it relates to a customer concern, power outage or other incidents. It enables the utility’s corporate communications staff to interact with social media users, whether they are following the utility or not in a defined geographical area or region.

Energy conservation programmes, notification of planned outages, updates on major outages and other types of information that are important to consumers can be communicated through social media.

Other innovative geospatial technologies and business practices that utilities are embracing as they move toward becoming data-driven enterprises in the new Smart Grid world are listed below.

• Mobile solutions – Currently among the biggest benefits of geospatial in the utility sector are found with location-aware work and asset management including mobile solutions which provide access to asset and work information to field staff and management using, iPad and Android tablets.

conversion effort. This scanning approach presents problems for underground infrastructure—but equipment for scanning those is always improving such as ground penetrating radar, electromagnetic induction which enables 3D models of underground infrastructure.”

Open source geospatial technology

Many small and medium-sized organisations that cannot afford to invest in expensive proprietary GIS solutions are now choosing open-source software. The Research and Markets report Global GIS Market in the Utility Industry 2014-2018 identified an important market trend in the increasing penetration of open-source geospatial software into the small and mediium-sized utility market. But even large utilities such as Duke Energy are realising the benefits of sharing open source software based on open standards with other utilities. Duke recently formed the Coalition of the Willing to encourage shared solutions, based on open source software and open standards.

Open source has long provided the tools required to manage huge volumes for data. Hadoop is a virtual industry standard for managing “big data”. To enable distributed databases like Accumulo (based on Hadoop), to manage huge volumes of geospatial data — two open source geospatial projects GeoWave and GeoMesa — enable the management of massive amounts of geoinformation in “big spatial data” databases. These databases take advantage of distrib-

26 / Geospatial World / April 2015

uted processing to dramatically reduce the time required to query and update spatial databases. The Centre for Distributed Generation, part of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi developed a web-based open source geospatial application based on OGC standards to estimate the rooftop solar power generation potential of a city.

Spatial analytics

One of the important application areas of spatial analytic is disaster planning and management. The frequency and severity of extreme weather events is increasing, hence most utilities consider disaster management as their priority. With GIS, weather services utilities are able to do a lot of planning of crew resources and network assets, reduce restoration time and costs, ensure crew and public safety, optimise damage assessment, and keep the public informed during storms.

Utilities can also quantitatively monitor storm impact on infrastructure like transformers in real-time and by using geofences to setup alerts for lightning strikes. Correlating storm and outage events help utilities to predict the types of outages to be expected as a storm moves across the utility’ service territory and ensure that the appropriate equipment and crews are in the right place at the right time.

For example, Hurricane Sandy severely impacted the New Jersey Natural Gas (NJNG) infrastructure, but NJNG was able to restore their services in record time. They used their GIS to quickly develop a situational assessment of the damage caused

• BIM and geospatial – The convergence of geospatial and model-based design is transforming how we plan, design, build and operate and maintain electric power networks including generation, transmission, substations, distribution and home and office networks.

• Energy efficiency of buildings – In the E.U. 40 % of energy demand comes from buildings. In the U.S. 70% of electric power is consumed by buildings. Energy performance modeling uses BIM and geospatial data to reduce the energy requirements of buildings.

• Wearable technology – Enables human beings to become location-aware multiple sensor devices that help utilities improve safety and productivity.

• Augmented reality – Combining real-world objects with objects that are not visible such as underground infrastructure or objects that have been designed, but not built allows visualisation of underground infrastructure and infrastructure in design.

• Reusing earth observation imagery – Inexpensive, ubiquitous

satellite imagery is being reused for distribution network monitoring, estimating solar potential of towns and cities, and verifying compliance with solar PV permitting.

• Predictive analytics – Predicting when devices are likely to fail is necessary in order to implement condition-based as opposed to calendar-based maintenance. Utilities are also using predictive analytics to predict outages under different weather conditions • Grid situational awareness - GIS provides a wide area situational awareness analysis platform for utilities.

• Ground penetrating radar and other subsurface utility engineering (SUE) technologies – In the United States underground infrastructure including electric conductors is hit by excavators every 60 seconds. Scanning technologies such as ground penetrating radar (GPR) and electromagnetic induction (EMI) are being used by utilities and municipalities to improve information about underground infrastructure including creating 3D models.

by the storm and to manage the restoration process. Another very important benefit of the GIS was that NJNG were able to provide timely information to the public on the status of the network including estimated time of service restoration.

Conclusion

The new world of inexpensive distributed generation, Smart Grid technology and the desire of customers to control and manage their energy usage is transforming every aspect of the utility sector. The role of utility GIS is expected to touch every aspect of a utilities business, affecting customers, operations and management. With the changes that the electric power industry is undergoing now, geospatial is poised to become a foundation technology for the Smart Grid. As Navigant Research has concluded — The Smart Grid is all about situation awareness and effective anticipation of and response to events that might disrupt the performance of the power grid. Since spatial data underlies everything an electric utility does, GIS is the only foundational view that can potentially link every operational activity of an electric utility including design and construction, asset management, workforce management, and outage management as well as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distribution management systems (DMSs), renewables, and strategy planning.

Geoff Zeiss, Editor — Building and Energy geoff@geospatialmedia.net

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 27

Electricity / Interview

‘Way forward for electric utilities - Better data, better analytics and the ability to predict’ In conversation with Robert Sarfi, Managing Partner, Boreas Group LLC, Geoff Zeiss, Editor- Building & Energy delves deeper to understand the importance of data management and the challenges electric utilities face.

So far how has been your experience working with the utility sector?

I am working with electric utilities since 1993 and I am involved in strategic technology planning, deployment, cost justification and benefit validation. I try figuring out how a utility company can best leverage technology to drive business value. This is, in fact, the core of my business since last decade. We develop concepts and visions for modern utility and build plans to put utility on a roadmap to achieve those plans. In the last five years, we have done national level smart grid plans, primarily in West Africa and South East Asia.

What are the key aspects of smart grid if we talk about utilities in Americas and internationally?

Utilities across the world face a few challenges — safety, reliability and cost of service are the top three. These are symptoms and the solution is utility-specific. You have to look at their issues, their priorities and then figure out the best possible solution.

As far as smart grid is concerned, several countries have only one utility company. What are the major challenges they face?

Most of these are supported or implemented by the Ministry of Energy. They may have one or two utilities supervised by the Ministry. The challenge is – these may include existing infrastructure issues, adequacy of supply issues and viability issues. And then, we have explosive growth potential.

Imagine a North American or Western European utility with all their problems exaggerated to 15 times. There is so much higher impact than we are used to see.

What is at the back of your vision when you strategise a utility? Do you find clarity in what utilities consider as their priorities?

They have priorities, conflicting ones at that. That’s where the real challenge comes in when we are building a vision.

I tell people that the new regulatory requirements or an external event is good for a utility because it calls for action.

You have to work with them to create a balance.

Data quality is the biggest challenge utilities are facing.

How have utilities changed their business processes to optimise data quality?

There are a couple of utilities, which truly believe in the power of data, but there is a cost associated with that data.

They engage in a data cleansing activity and find ways to not corrupt the data.

Utilities, at times, spend on data cleansing operations and then they neglect data management. Your take?

You need predictive modelling to do this — a detailed model that predicts minute, hour, day at least two days ahead. For such accurate modelling, we need good connectivity model and better understanding of our loads than

ever before. Predictive modelling is able to predict when a transformer is going to fail based on its load pattern.

Have you come across utilities that have realised how valuable data is?

Data quality and predictive modelling are two key aspects of smart grid deployment and both involve data. Right now those who are doing a really nice job are doing it using focussed applications. A lot is being done in the transformer load calculation too. Those who have used these pointed applications have realised its power and, in fact, been encouraged to engage in more such projects. However, they also realise that in order to do this, they need to clean up their data. In lot of cases, they fix up the data, but many a times data is stored in silos so it is difficult to correlate and connect data. So, they end up doing data mash-up and try to visualise it, which is almost impossible.

Utilities are trying to bring data together in some way, and now see the importance of geospatial technology.

How is GIS is becoming a foundational technology compared to being a tactical technology?

Every system has a concept of sub-stationing. So, every operational engineering based system will have sub-stationing.

When you try to do analytics using large volumes of data, if the sub-station doesn’t match, you are in trouble. It is just one example, on the surface you think how difficult it is to match all sub-stations across systems. It is much harder than you think, especially in a big utility company.

A study says by 2018, cloud services will make half of the IT portfolio of over 60% of utilities. Do you see that happening considering that SMEs do not have either geospatial or IT capabilities?

I really believe in cloud based solutions. The issue I have with cloud based solutions right now is the cost of infrastructure associated with it. The primary motivation for cloud solution is commercial. These utilities — small to large — feel the cost is too high that they feel they can buy a supercomputer and employ researchers in the service cost offered.

The traditional GIS model is what is called infinite time model. You collect the data, analyse it and it takes a long time to submit the report. In utility space where we have spatial data coming from umpteen sensors, this needs to be done in microseconds. In this new paradigm, how do you see geospatial being integrated with other processes?

Will today’s LBS and GIS vendors be able to achieve this or we will see a whole new bunch of companies, either start-ups or companies like Trimble, bringing a lot of technology solutions in one basket?

Data quality and predictive modelling are key aspects of smart grid deployment” A few players will be there for a long time. GIS of the future might consider location, involve real time data transfer and analytics; and might look at both past and the future. Past is really important when you are talking about predicting the future. Future is exciting with new entrants joining the game and there’s going to be three dimensional or may be four dimensional spatial components. Part of this is going to be market-driven. The tough part for most utilities is that it is regulated and that doesn’t necessarily promote a culture where innovation can exist freely. I see that in some Asian markets where business models are changing owing to supply scarcity.

Business models keep on evolving in North America utility market, which has about 3000 utility companies.

States are working on new business models for utilities.

Fundamentally, they are de-coupling their revenue from selling power. Do you see this happening in Asia and other parts of the world?

I feel, in the coming decade we will see a completely different business model. We have to challenge ourselves so that we are not part of the problem. The PVs and solar city models that are available in the market today are now posing a challenge to the traditional models. Fundamentally, for utilities, there should be better data, better analytics and the ability to predict things including climate change.

So, GIS is absolutely fundamental since it brings in all the data from this siloed applications together?

There won’t be change overtime. I am not sure how our business models will look like after two decades. But I know that if I can control my data, I can do the right analysis and respond and articulate well to my stakeholders. It’s about how you can be in control of your business by controlling the right data.

Talking about the new labour force, what kind of training they require to handle the evolving utility practices and processes?

My generation and the generations before me were building the infrastructure that we have today. We didn’t have real-time visibility that people now do. What excites me is the fact that youngsters today are smart and analytical. They bring skills that we never had access to I hope they use the foundation we provided them to the maximum and solve problems that we never thought we could.

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 29

Electricity / Case study

more power to

electric utilities Trey Price, Electric Engineering GIS Analyst, Denton Municipal Electric throws light on the need to embrace GIS as one of the core ‘utility grade’ technologies

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he advent of the electric utility, at the turn of the 20th century, brought in a significant change to the way people lived their lives. Lights could be turned on at night, large factories could operate large powered machinery and people had access to easier sources of home heating, cooling besides, of course, the Internet.

Technology has improved and changed. The paradigm has begun to shift on how energy is delivered to the home or office. Electric utilities have changed significantly too.

Combined factors give way to a storm of opportunity for geospatially aware technology to bridge the gaps in the way electric utilities operate.

Challenges for electric utilities

The old model would place all the emphasis on Customer Information System (CIS) without much spatial awareness of the grid. The CIS is still an important tool for the electric utility, but Geographic Information Systems (GIS) integrated to utilities’ CIS, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and AMI systems puts more power into the operational and supervisory staff of an electric utility. Systems such as AMI and SCADA need to have the geospatial awareness that GIS brings to the table.

The state of Texas has had an interesting set of challenges for its electric utility. The state market is divided into the

deregulated investor owned market, the cooperative owned system and the municipality owned model. The city of Denton, Texas operates its own municipal electric utility – Denton Municipal Electric (DME). Located north of Dallas and Fort Worth, Denton is a full service city, operating the electric utility as well as water, wastewater, and landfill services.

Utility Grade is one term that is used more often at DME to describe how the business is. The GIS department at DME has a primary goal of providing with ‘Utility Grade’ geospatial and technology services. This also means that GIS has been identified as one of the core technologies for the electric utility. The GIS at DME is also one of the ‘Utility Grade’ systems alongside the CIS, SCADA and AMI systems. For over 10 years, DME has been using an Esri ArcGIS based solution with Schneider Electric’sArcFM and recently has implemented a few new products to enhance the goals of the utility in the 21st century. And GIS has also been integrated with the CIS, SCADA, and Integrated Voice Recognition (IVR) systems.

GIS gives out spatial location to each department at DME. System Operations ensure that they safely dispatch crews to outages or to address trouble calls from citizens.

The crews rely heavily on ArcFM Viewer for ArcGIS Engine map, so that they can view their location in the DME system and use a built-in GPS receiver in their laptops to track their

Utility Grade geospatial technology was driving the way that the users did work on a day-to-day basis 30 / Geospatial World / April 2015

position on the map. Crews can also send mobile sessions to the enterprise that contain Redline graphics regarding the actual state of the system, which helps DME crews to have ownership of the data in GIS. In 2012, DME and Schneider Electric implemented an inspection programme that worked with ArcFM Viewer for Engine. The programme allows DME to review the quality of the equipment used in the field at regular intervals. For staff sitting in office, an inspection plan has been formulated.

Sessions are created in the geodatabase, using the desktop ArcFM clients and then sent to the field users where they edit the inspection records and send back the information to the database. Office staff reviews the records to see if items need to be replaced, and the records are stored in the geodatabase.

Implementation of new software

DME began the process of upgrading and implementing new software in 2013. Previously, the GIS database was located

at an offsite location and on outdated hardware and software, with no options for disaster recovery or high availability options besides a daily tape backup. The database and software were upgraded to Esri’s 10.1 platform in August 2013. The database also migrated to new hardware that had onsite and offsite redundancies for high availability and disaster recovery options. With the additional capabilities of the software at 10.1, the base was set to implement additional enhancements for DME’s geospatial infrastructure.

The first step taken was to upgrade the fiber optic cable data in the GIS database to Schneider Electric’s Fibre Manager model. The primary function of the fibre optic system at DME is to provide communications from all of the sub-stations operated by DME as well as provide additional service to the City of Denton’s facilities located around the city. DME also provided additional services to Denton County and the State of Texas facilities located within the city limits of Denton.

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 31

Electricity / Case study

GIS gives out spatial location to each department at DME. System Operations ensure that they safely dispatch crews to outages or to address trouble calls from citizens The migration of the DME fibre data into the new Fibre Manager model allows the communications staff at DME to power their day-to-day business with the power of GIS. Following the implementation of Fibre Manager, DME identified a need to provide an internal GIS based map to the entire enterprise. The ArcFM for Silverlight web map was deployed to an intranet based site. Now the maps of the entire system — powered by GIS — were available to all the employees of DME. This eliminated the need to have large installations on many of the desktops at DME. Users suddenly found themselves using the map on a daily basis, including users that previously did not identify a need for access to GIS. Utility Grade geospatial technology was driving the way that the users did work on a day-to-day basis.

Denton also identified a need to replace their existing Outage Management System in 2014. They also identified the need to integrate these systems into the other information tools

32 / Geospatial World / April 2015

that DME also uses. Integrations were built so that the IVR, CIS and SCADA could communicate better data into the OMS. Schneider Electric’s Responder OMS was identified as the product to replace DME’s previous system. The sophisticated integrations alongside DME’s GIS would give a significant amount of data to the electric system operators whose primary goal is to ensure the safety of the crews while making sure that power is restored in a timely manner.

Using the Multispeak platform, Schneider Electric and DME developed, tested and implemented integrations to these systems. SCADA could provide real time status at the substations, giving the operators an idea when some of the larger loads are lost on the system. The IVR system takes phone calls from customers reporting they have no power. Combined with the GIS and CIS data, calls from IVR could quickly identify the location of incidents for the system operators to dispatch. And responder works to predict which devices may be malfunctioning and in need of repair based upon the spatial location of the calls with the electric network in GIS. Responders are able to integrate the data from the meters in the field. The newer advanced meters read a great deal of information about the condition of the electricity being fed into the grid to the home. One of the biggest pieces is whether or not the lights are on or not. This is incredibly insightful to the state of the system due to certain conditions that would cause either the SCADA system to not record issues on a smaller basis or for many of the citizens who do not call in outages on the IVR. In many cases, this turns the relationship between the electric utility and the consumer around. The utility would know the consumer is out before a consumer has time to report an issue. This would go a long way to increase customer satisfaction in the electric utility and improve a utility’s response time to an incident.

The key to a successful future for any electric utility lies in the way it adapts to the changing technological world over the coming years. Denton Municipal Electric has identified the best way to adapt to this change is to embrace GIS as one of the core utility grade technologies. Staff benefits with better tools as they work to provide better electric service to the consumer. This includes providing field staff with a GIS solution, providing office staff with readily available GIS data and providing system operations with a fully integrated Outage Management System powered by GIS.

Electricity / Interview

Requisites for smooth functioning of utilities

W

hat do you think are the biggest challenges the electric power utility sector is facing, especially with respect to smart grid?

Smart grid is interesting as well as necessary, but from my observations, the real challenges fall into a handful of related categories such as inspection, maintenance and reconstruction, labour force changes and supply/demand management. The crucial ones are, of course, inspections, maintenance and reconstruction since infrastructure — not only the equipment, but the structures — is ageing. And an enormous amount of capital is being pumped in to keep up.

This is exacerbated by weather pattern changes. Much of the evidence for this is apocryphal, but I know of two large customers (one of our regular ones), who have had massive inspection programmes to mitigate weather related infrastructure damage. Significant unpredicted outages due to ice and salt take the load off conductors. The weather problem isn’t strictly related to the age of the infrastructure, and inspections have to adapt to weather patterns, weather events and proactively inspect equipment that’s at highest risk.

The labour force issue is also impacting utilities for long now and much system knowledge is retiring. Risk was

34 / Geospatial World / April 2015

Up-close with Stephen Brockwell, President, Brockwell IT, Geoff Zeiss - Editor, Energy and Building finds out how electric utilities are taking stock of challenges and adopting new technologies by integrating spatial data

mitigated by people who know system, the lines and the transformers and had 30 years’ experience in keeping it operating. With the loss of that knowledge, it’s not clear if there are systems in place to replace them. Spatial data has a role in this, but it’s not sufficient. Big data and learning systems can mitigate some of it, but those are massive investments that are complex to implement. I don’t think most utilities have been completely successful when implementing predictive maintenance as part of asset management. Many have programmes to put it in place.

Supply and demand management are made vastly more complex by diversity of energy sources and opening the grid to different generation and consumption patterns. The real-time and big-data systems manage the data for these patters are not fully evolved from what I can see.

What are the key IT technologies, especially location-aware that are contributing in transforming the electric power industry ?

When it comes to the assessment of field conditions in emergency and maintenance situations, good old-fashioned GPS and its increasing position is ubiquitous. But reality capture using LIDAR and other technologies has enormous promise as well. Massively detailed information about a site

has become very affordable. The integration of the capture devices with fully functional tablet-like network-connected field computers is in combination with the cloud for storing and managing the massive data sets has enormous promise for accelerating the entire site survey and design process.

There’s another important aspect to that — designers can design with enormous precision and with realistic 3D models that are structurally and electrically balanced.

In your experience working in the electric power utility industry, where has geospatial data and technology had the biggest impact? Where do you expect it to have the biggest impact in the future?

Geospatial data and technology is regarded as indispensable.

I don’t know of a utility that doesn’t understand that at this point. City planners for a medium-sized municipality that operates electric, gas, water and waste water infrastructure with over 60,000 service connections for each discipline have a massive backlog problem. Their location data for as-builts is becoming increasingly out-of-date because they don’t have the resources in place. They also don’t have the regulatory framework to hold engineering firms to account to deliver accurate as-built data. Accurate here means a survey-quality design with elevation and relative location details. They knew that they simply had no choice, but to address the gap.

The problem is defining a sustainable data programme that addresses the need for timeliness and accuracy and finding new ways to approach the problem of data capture.

I think it is not impossible that, in the not-too-distant future, a municipality will use one of the numerous partners out there to skip 2D data capture altogether—we’re almost at the point where it would be cheaper to scan all the facilities than it would be embark on an old-fashioned off-shore 2D scanning and conversion effort.

The metrics for old-school migration no longer make sense. The ROI is long-term too and the quality management programmes are too intensive while the duration of such projects simply puts too much risk on the organisation. This scanning approach presents problems for underground infrastructure, but equipment for scanning those is also improving.

We need to completely redefine storage management, data management and other scenarios. 2D data used for the connected network will be a projection of the 3D data augmented with SCADA information about device states. That’s future, but it ties in big-data and cloud computing with many of the services that are production ready today.

Industry leaders are projecting a much greater role for analytics and especially spatial analytics as utilities transform themselves into data-driv-

en enterprises. What has your experience been with analytics, especially spatial analytics, when working with utilities?

That’s a very exciting area, especially when it comes to correlating weather events, soil conditions, ice loading with age, design parameters and condition of equipment. It should have been possible to predict the recent weather-related outages in Ontario. I believe changes will be made to get moving on that.

Many don’t fully realise this, but most of the database technologies have easy-to-use tools for analytics management. That’s one change we had been championing for years. Once spatial data is simply a column in a database, it can be processed and managed through the architectural tiers as easily as any other data. Spatial analytics problems are now data analytics problems; more needs to be done to push spatial processing into the cores of big data tools. It is, however, not impossible to extend them today to perform that function because the database fundamentals have been in place for a number of years.

Design technology is moving from CAD to BIM (Building Information Modelling for infrastructure) motivated by improving efficiency. Are you seeing the adoption of this new technology by utilities for designing distribution networks, substations, transmission lines, generation facilities, and other infrastructure?

BIM is fine for the structural elements, but it doesn’t come close to covering the complexity and design problems faced by electric power engineers. Inadequate investment in harmonised design processes are seen. The GIS data is pulled in, the design is done, the construction’s completed and the as-built is redrafted. I strongly believe that utilities need their own modelling tools, specific to their business that handles both site-specific modelling conditions and the long distance nature of transmission and distribution networks.

Are you seeing demand from electric power utility customers to support standards that include geospatial standards such as Multispeak ?

We’re supporting a number of customer efforts by providing Multispeak interfaces for some of the hosted services the customers use to capture real time data.

For smaller customers in Ontario, that means ensuring the network is compliant with Multispeak 3.0.

That is a process to keep its representation in the SCADA/ OMS hosted system up to date and having web services available to receive the real-time information and store a representation of it appropriate for geospatial analysis.

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 35

An augmented reality solution that uses GIS data to visualise underground infrastructure and has the potential to revolutionise the way users view and manage their assets is the need of the hour

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isruptive technologies or disruptive innovations are the technological advances that fundamentally change a market or industry, often by displacing an existing technology. Disruptive innovation is all around us, and has brought about many changes. Wireless technology fundamentally changed the nature of communications and now, many tasks are completed by machines. For instance, routine sewer inspections are now being completed using CCTV and other methods of remote inspection, reducing the need for workers to venture into the system. Advances in renewables such as solar PV and energy storage seem poised to transform the electricity industry in future. In the information age, as industry becomes data-intensive, many disruptive technologies take the digital route. In its report — Digital

36 / Geospatial World / April 2015

Disruption – Short fuse, big bang? — Deloitte suggests that many Australian companies face a huge shake-up from emerging digital technologies in the coming three years.

Digital disruption is driving the next wave of technological evolution, and the utility sector is no exception.

Shaking up the utility locating sector

Utility location technologies have undergone various phases of innovation. Understanding underground assets is becoming increasingly important for utilities. In the past, we have seen a move away from relying solely on manual records and from more destructive methods of determining asset locations, such as exploratory digging or potholing. Non-invasive surveying technologies like ground penetrating radar (GPR), sonding technology, radio detection and electromagnetic induction

have also experienced widespread adoption. The next phase is likely to involve augmented reality overlays on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones, which use GIS data to visualise underground assets. One such solution is Augview, a software that displays geographic asset data such as maps, text or 3D visualisation transposed over a device’s live video feed. With Augview, the data can be updated in the field and information about new assets uploaded in real time.

Digital innovations in locating technologies may be significant in the utility sector, where other disruptive innovations such as the integration of renewable energy into the grid and the resulting changes in demand mean that many companies are seeking ways to reduce capital expenditure. Despite the need to reduce costs, underground utility location is too vital to neglect. Advances in mobile technology can improve efficiency. Such softwares can improve data quality and make sure it remains as relevant as possible.

An industry opportunity

While change is often resisted, disruptive technology doesn’t need to be viewed as a threat to existing industry players.

The benefits to utilities that adopt the new technologies are manifold. User-friendly utility location technologies with intuitive interfaces may be increasingly vital in making sure workers and staff members are equipped with the information they need. This is relevant for utility location given the drastic consequences of inadequate knowledge regarding the location of buried services. Most utilities cite the safety of workers and the public as one of their foremost priorities. Hitting live underground assets can cause disruptions to important services, huge financial costs, injuries and even the loss of lives.

Unintentionally disrupting underground assets, during excavation — such as electricity cables and gas pipes — can result in dangerous explosions and fire, causing injuries or fatalities. Numerous instances of construction workers being hospitalised or even injured have occurred in the past, highlighting the necessity of effective utility location. Even contact with less dangerous assets can cause substantial damage and add up to significant financial costs and reduced productivity.

In a submission to the Productivity Commission’s enquiry into Australia’s infrastructure, Dial Before You Dig revealed

that the inadequate recording of underground asset locations, much of which occurred during the construction of the National Broadband Network (NBN), resulted in 15,900 incidents of damage to telecommunications assets alone in 3.25 years up to 2012. The NBN, which involves the partial replacement of Australia’s copper telecommunications network with faster, more advanced fibre optic technology, is the largest single infrastructure upgrade ever undertaken in the country.

Therefore, failure to notify Dial Before You Dig about the newly installed sub-terranean fibre optic cable resulted in countless undisclosed assets being accidentally excavated, causing substantial damage. Dial Before You Dig describes the damages having a ‘massive’ impact on the community and resulting in business disruptions due to service outages, extended road closures, project delays pending preliminary investigations and remediation, work safety issues, inflated insurance premiums and, ultimately, higher project costs.

While Dial Before You Dig is an invaluable resource, it relies on data being up-to-date. Contractors must submit the locations of new assets on time to prevent such incidents.

The easier and more streamlined the process is, the more up-to-date the data and the fewer assets at risk. This may represent an opportunity for the integration of technologies such as Augview, which allow workers to conveniently and immediately update data as soon as the asset is installed.

Coupled with existing surveying methods, these technologies represent a powerful tool for more effective utility location and to reduce costly and dangerous incidents.

Recently, a number of articles online have suggested that in future it will be possible to ‘see’ buried infrastructure through the use of an augmented reality overlay. Softwares such as Augview collate spatial information from various databases and allow users to view buried infrastructure and additional data in their real spatial positions via an augmented reality overlay on the screen of a tablet or smartphone. A case study is quoted below for better understanding —

Christchurch gas strike

In October 2014, residents were evacuated, businesses were shut down and traffic was diverted as a result of a gas pipe strike in Christchurch, New Zealand. The incident occurred when a digging contractor, working on the site, hit the T-joint on the saddle of a buried gas pipeline. While the gas pipeline

User-friendly utility location technologies with intuitive interfaces may be vital in making sure workers and staff members are equipped with the necessary information Geospatial World / April 2015 / 37

Electricity / Augmented Reality

Tragedies can be averted by opting for an augmented reality GIS application that has the potential to reduce the number of asset strikes itself was recorded on the maps and the contractor was using to determine buried asset locations, the T-joint jutting out of it was not displayed. This resulted in the major leak that held up about 10,000 drivers, halted train services and forced the evacuation of schools and workplaces up to 500 metres away from the scene.

Had the contractor been able to see a 3D representation of the T-joint in its real position in relation to the pipe, this incident could have been avoided. For utilities across the world, asset strikes like this one occur weekly, if not daily. The potential dangers of accidental utility contact are serious – they can result in injuries or even death to contractors, field staff and anyone in the vicinity. The economic costs of asset and equipment damage, project delays, staff evacuations and traffic diversions stretch into hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

How can such tragedies be prevented? The need arises for an augmented reality GIS application that has the potential to drastically reduce the number of asset strikes occurring around the world. Augview is one such software that allows users to tap into the benefits of a mobile GIS system and visualise underground assets on a mobile device. The software provides one simple, easy-to-use tool to visualise the underground asset landscape. Unlike the current methods, which require workers to refer to hard copy maps to locate assets, it takes the guesswork out of the situation by positioning assets where they should be – using GPS coordinates as the reference.

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As more and more utility infrastructure is placed underground, the accurate location and identification of underground assets becomes ever more vital to prevent accidental excavation. An augmented reality solution that has the potential to revolutionise the way users view and manage location data.

Most excavation workers will be well aware of the results of unintentionally contacting buried assets. Accidental excavation frequently causes severe asset damage, resulting in substantial costs, project delays and service outages.

Contact with certain assets, such as high voltage cables and high pressure gas mains, can also damage surrounding property and cause injuries, or even fatalities.

Yet incidents of accidental excavation are still disturbingly common. This is often because the records used by excavators are inaccurate, incomplete or out-of-date. Essentially, this indicates that the current methods of recording and managing underground asset data can still be improved upon.

The future of utility location

New technologies suggest exciting possibilities for the future of the utility locating field. In particular, an augmented reality solution looks set to be the next big disruptive innovation in the locating business, and for good reason. Augview provides a number of significant benefits to utility locators and surveyors and could replace or complement various existing technologies and practices as a result.

This allows workers to ‘see’ the location of underground assets in their environment, rather than relying on manual records that may or may not be current. The data is not limited to geographic coordinates of assets; it also provides valuable attributes data such as who owns any given asset and its status. Augview can connect with multiple different GIS servers simultaneously and help users in choosing the multiple source of the data. It is completely non-destructive and can complement existing asset locating techniques such as ground penetrating radar (GPR), sonar technology, radio detection and electromagnetic induction.

Options can be enabled to allow verified users to update outdated or inaccurate asset data in the field and instantly record the locations of newly buried assets. This can decrease delays associated with recording asset data and making it available to other contractors who might be completing works in the area, minimising the time assets lie unprotected.

Enhancing safety in the field

Safety should be a key priority for everyone involved in excavation, utility location and surveying. Here, an augmented reality solution can play a pivotal role in providing a number of innovative opportunities to improve upon current practices.

In addition to visualising the position of buried assets using the most up-to-date information from verified sources, it also enables real-time safety updates and warnings. When new hazards or faults arise and are recorded, they become immediately visible to users. This provides obvious benefits over workers receiving hazard information before a job and needing to remember it when they are busy working on a project, or worse, receiving it at some stage after they have already begun works.There is a need for a solution that provides a range of customisable options for organisations to ensure that workers receive and register critical warnings about potentially dangerous assets in the field when and where they need them.

For instance, in New Zealand, an electricity infrastructure owner wanted to make their dangerous assets more visible to workers. Augview altered the programme to make the companies’ high voltage power cables flash and glow in the augmented reality view, so they would immediately grab the users attention.

While the electricity distributor had labelled areas on paper plans and PDF’s with disclaimers and warnings where their asset data was incomplete, they were concerned that no one would read them in Augview and excavators would assume it was safe to dig. As a result, a warning triangle was created to appear on the screen whenever Augview was opened in these areas. This warning requires acknowledgment before it will disappear and allow the user to continue using the program.

Using familiar devices

Mobile solutions are already becoming increasingly valuable for asset management in the utility sector and many field workers already carry at least one mobile device with them.

Augview can save time and reduce operational overheads by enabling workers to view data from multiple sources and efficiently complete important processes that once required extensive paperwork, all through the one interface. In the case that no reliable internet connection is available, Augview can also be used in offline mode. Using a familiar device

provides various benefits, especially when it comes to training new or inexperienced staff in the software. Furthermore, Augview operates with a consistent look across different devices and operating systems, easing the transition if the hardware is replaced or updated.

In a future where employees regularly change jobs and experienced staff move towards retirement, an intuitive GIS solution for utility location will be vital.

Enhanced security

While asset data must be accessible to those planning and completing works, this data can be commercially sensitive and may involve security risks. Augview does not make a copy of asset data in order to display it. Instead, it collates live up-to-date asset information for the desired area from a variety of GIS server sources that it has permission to access. The data itself remains safely on the asset owners’ servers. Unlike paper plans or other documents, if the device is lost or stolen, access to the data can be easily and remotely disabled. Access to Augview and its various features can be granted and revoked at any time for any device over the web-based management portal.

The utility location sector is ready for a shake-up and it may be that we will soon see augmented reality become an everyday part of utility location, surveying and excavation professionals’ work. Coupled with existing surveying methods technologies, Augview represents a powerful tool for utility location, ushering the field into a safer, more efficient future.

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 39

Electricity / Innovation

Apptimising data management

Apps for electrical utilities are analysing the impact of prosumers on their network and come as handy tools in maintaining stability

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aintaining stability is one of the major challenges for electrical utilities in the field of renewable energy. At times, when consumption of energy is fine, we see raises and drops in the low voltage network due to energy producing sources — for example — wind turbines and solar panels (PV, photovoltaic) on the roofs of houses or at wind/solar parks. These so called “prosumers” cause instabilities in low-voltage distribution networks and need to be managed with efficiency.

Special ‘Apps’ for fast and simple network impact analysis by network calculations, together with tools for planning and sketching of alternative solutions to solve such issues. These tools help utilities to fulfill their legal obligations in the context of renewable energy and help them perform network quality assessment for any new application to install a solar panel or equivalent device in order to improve the overall quality of the distribution network.

Easy-to-use interface

Together with EWE Netz GmbH, Germany’s fifth largest utility in the northern parts of the country, the apps for smart GIS through an easy-to-use interface with a Stop-Light Visualisation were developed. The aim of these apps is to support the assessment process of new prosumer applications to provide energy into the existing distribution network. The evaluation is done by means of voltage drop calculations without these Renewable Energy Sources (DERs) being active, or by calculating the raise in voltage level assuming that no one consumes energy and only the DERs produce energy. Based on Esri’s ArcGIS Server, these Apps enable a process of simulation for different network planning situations. The apps are built using a straight forward step-by-step approach. The results of any kind of assessment are presented in green-yellow-red colours to indicate further directions.

In case critical values are superseded, an employee may defer the case to an expert who may perform more detailed

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simulation scenarios. Here, you may think of switch-order simulations, cable enforcements, or perhaps even the exchange of a transformer in a substation. Hidden under the user interface, such apps offer functionalities for server-based attribute editing and sketching of network planning objects in the GIS. The JavaScript-based Client Framework for UT Server has proven to be an elegant platform for integrating many different functional requirements.

Upfront investigations are run in a sub-station to analyse the scenario and a tab is kept on — the number of service points and residents being served by a particular station; how much energy is being fed in to the low-voltage network; is the current transformer powerful enough to supply all necessary energy; how is the entire voltage drop over the entire feeder network, etc.

The Network Connection Assessment Apps, especially the NCA-Calculate App, takes all relevant GIS data through a feeder trace and transfers it into the network calculation software package. The results are displayed in tabular form and on the map in stop-light colours. The user interface of these Apps is simple, straight forward and easy-to-learn.

Apps supporting planning and simulation

The NCA-Plan App allows uncomplicated network analysis on the impact of a DERs in different alternative scenarios: Am I to encounter difficulties and outages with a certain plan? The app enables a user to sketch new network elements, by means of an elegant gallery of predefined planning elements.

The NCA-Calculate App brings in the newly-sketched network elements together with the existing network data and perform a network calculation to determine the impact of the planned and simulated new network. The network planner may even consider different measurements, for example, the stepwise increase of transformer levels. Alternatively, he may also enlarge the electrical capacity of the network by laying out an

extra cable, which – of course – is a more expensive scenario.

All actions are actually combinations of sketched planning elements that are “merged” with the existing network before performing the assessment calculations. And the results are visualised on the map in green-yellow-red colours.

In many occasions, it is a good option to switch parts of the network in such a way that the newly planned objects will be fed by another feeder in the network. The planning app can place such temporary switches and simulate their impact by performing a new network trace and a network calculation. Altogether, these apps bring quite complicated matters to the end user in an extremely easy way.

Separating as-built network data from the planned network

Most utilities want to keep the as-built network data as they are. There is a daily process of updating this network data.

Planning new networks will happen in a separate layer. The challenge is then, to bring as-built and planned network data together in order to perform the correct network traces and network calculations. The planning and calculation apps handles this by temporarily applying the planned features to the existing data. The result works as if someone was editing the data and performing a trace and doing a network calculation. This process is then ended without saving the data, and in

The planning apps help utilities in separating as-built network data from the planned network this way keeping the as-built data unharmed. The calculation results for any electrical feeder may be presented in a tabular form or in the map. It is also possible to export the entire process into a nicely formatted report for later documentation of the different planning alternatives.

Such reports are documents that are associated to the planning project. In general, the planning project and its associated alternative scenarios are graphically presented on the map. This provides an overall overview to the network planner. The attached documents can be retrieved at any later point in time. Most likely a network planner will remove unnecessary planning alternatives.

As-builting planned network

Generally after doing your network analysis and simulations, the next phase that follows is the “as-builting”, when plans

Imagery of InfoApp

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 41

Electricity / Innovation

Overview image of PlanApp Construction tool

become reality. The NCA-Plan App provides some excellent tools to support this process. There is an entire suite of construction and dimensioning tools to project the new network into and on top of the existing network. The gallery of planning materials is extended for this specific purpose, enabling the user to pick materials from the utility companies Material Management System, most likely, containing Compatible Units (CU). The predefined attributes of these CUs are automatically set for all planning elements in the gallery of sketching tools. Attribute editing after sketching is always possible.

In this phase, a network planner will have many scenarios in parallel. He may also start a new scenario based on an existing one. For each scenario the Planning App will keep track of a detailed list of materials to be used, the so called Bill of Materials: how many meters of cable type so and so were designed and how many new devices were installed or old ones removed? Most of our utilities keep this material information in external system, for example — SAP. The NCA-Plan App allows reading relevant information from these systems. The bill of materials is also saved as a document that is permanently associated to the planning project and the as-built scenario. Such lists may be printed, but they can also be exported to any other office system, for example Microsoft Excel, and other softwares.

Arrival of data and requirements that apply to data?

In order to be able to provide the necessary network information for any kind of network calculation, the data need to fulfill a minimal set of requirements: • There is full network topology, including internals of stations • All switchable devices in the network topology have correct normal position settings

42 / Geospatial World / April 2015

• All DERs must be associated to a service point or other device in the network.

The built-in calculation engine performs its network calculations based on an Arc-Node-topology and a so called “Cable Book”, with important electrical properties of cables and devices being used in the calculation process.

Webservices and apps

All these editing, planning and simulation capabilities are actually based on Webservices using Esri’sArcGIS Server technology. AED-SICAD provides additional capabilities to these Webserviceswith the ArcFM UT Server. Over the last two years the UT Server was enhanced with Editing, Planning and Calculation capabilities that reside in the new Server extensions UT Server Edit, Plan and NCS. Of course, the end-user needs client apps to enable the server capabilities. This is handled by using the Esri ArcGIS Server API for JavaScript. NCA-Edit — Plan and Calculate Apps all working together with the NCA-Info App that provides generic viewing and querying functionality on your utility network.

EWE Netz GmbH staff have been using these capabilities since June 2012 in a production environment. The results are excellent: the “smartGIS” apps have helped to reduce the processing time of applications for renewable energy by customers drastically. This has led to less instability in the distribution network. The evolution of a project-based solution into a standard product enables many other utilities now to profit from this hard R&D effort. Server-based network planning and network calculation and simulation is now available for everyone.

Gerald Kreuwel, Product Manager, AED-SICAD AG

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Anti-Poaching / Article

UAVs: Innovative anti-poaching solution Dr Thomas Snitch, Senior Professor, Institute of Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland shares his insight on how satellites, algorithms and UAVs are used to target poachers in Africa

T

he global poaching situation has reached crisis proportions. In India, 17 tigers have been killed by poachers since January, 2015 while estimates suggest that 66 tigers were poached in 2014. Even leopards — with 116 killed in 2014 in India — have become the target of poachers. Most disturbingly, in 2014 about 1215 rhinos were killed in South Africa for their horns, which end up in Vietnam as purported cures for cancer and as enhancers of virility. Similarly, it is estimated that over 30,000 African elephants were slaughtered last year for their ivory that was turned into bracelets and trinkets in China. To put that in perspective, the world loses three rhinos a day and an elephant every 15 minutes. Simply stated, about 100 elephants

44 / Geospatial World / April 2015

are slaughtered every day, and the brutal fact is that is this is an unsustainable situation.

Technology comes in

In the past 10 years, the poaching of these and other animals, as well as rare plants, has increased exponentially, primarily because it has become one of the most lucrative criminal businesses on the planet. Rhino horns can fetch $50,000 per kilogram,which costs more than any illegal narcotic. A pair of elephant tusks may fetch about $125,000.

Most of these illegal activities are run by Asian criminal syndicates. There are well founded beliefs that some of the proceeds from this illegal activity are being funnelled

expand anti-poaching programmes across Southern Africa.

Very high resolution satellite imagery is used to provide extremely detailed maps of the topography of an area. A wide array of data, with many different variables, is collected and overlaid on the imagery. By using algorithms, an analytical model is devised on how animals, poachers, and rangers move simultaneously through space and time.

A step ahead

into political extremists in Africa. Moreover, in most nations around the world, the criminal penalties for possession of rhino horn or elephants tusks are minimal.

To combat poaching in Africa and Asia, a team at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Studies teamed up with the Lindbergh Foundation to create the Air Shepherd initiative. The one-of-its-kind effort is created to

The real game changer is the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones, which began flying in Africa since May, 2013. These drones have become shepherds in the air, hence the name. Technology can be a wonderful tool, but it must give the right solution for a particular problem. Unfortunately, this has not been the case of attacking poaching in Africa and Asia. Complex engineering solutions that have worked for the US military in Afghanistan may not necessarily work in the African bush, at night, searching for poachers.

Now, the most challenging question arises — how UAVs can be used in Africa and when and where to fly them? There is a need to constantly remind ourselves that UAVs are tools and nothing more. They are not the proverbial silver bullet.

Africa is too big to be tapped simply launching drones into the night sky with the hope of spotting rhinos or poachers – this is where the analytical models come into play.

With accuracies near 90% certainty, it can be detected where the rhinos are likely to be on a particular night. At the same time, by mathematically recreating the environment when previous poachings have occurred, we have a very good idea of when and where poachers are likely to strike. By

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 45

Anti-Poaching / Article

simply looking for patterns of behaviour of both animals and poachers, this knowledge can be leveraged in ways to counteract any sort of illegal activity.

Tapping the scene

There is no need of finding poachers; only the whereabouts of rhinos are enough. Since a large proportion of poaching occurs on nights around a full moon, it makes more sense because poachers can easily track the prey. In one area where the team had months of experience and data, it was discovered that nearly every poaching, of any animal including those destined for the bush meat trade, occurred with 160 metres of a paved road.

Again, the analysis is quite simple – the poachers are driving the perimeter of the park in the late afternoon and spotting animals near the park fence. After sundown, the poachers return to the specific site, kill the animal and drive away.

The key is that the satellites, the analytics and math, and the UAVs are integrated into a total solutions package. With the knowledge of behavioural patterns, an additional tool is added. The analytical model tells precisely where the rangers should be deployed on a specific night, so that they can be in front of the rhinos and can intercept the poachers before they reach the target animal.

On the first UAV flight in South Africa, the UAV flew over the pre-determined spot and immediately found a

46 / Geospatial World / April 2015

female rhino and her calf. The animals were inside the reserve’s fence, but close to a major road. The drone was circled over the animals. Three individuals tried climbing the fence to kill the rhinos. the rangers, who had been pre-deployed in the area, arrested three poachers in under three minutes. This exercise has been repeated dozens of times over the past 20 months.

Thus, the most critical issue is not how far or how long a UAV can fly, but how fast can a ranger be moved in the bush at night, to affect a successful intercept. The UAVs pick up the poachers at least two kilometres from the rhinos, so in about 45 minutes authorities can move to the optimal position.

There are proof of concept and proof on the ground that UAVs can make a tremendous difference. The bad news is that poachers are moving to regions where such UAVs are not operating. To really address the challenges of poaching in Africa, nations in southern Africa need to be willing to test these solutions packages in their most critically endangered areas. The successful answer lies in the combination of satellites, great math, properly positioned rangers and UAVS with precise flight paths. By raising funds necessary to grow the use of this program across Africa and Asia, Air Shepherd’s efforts can beat the poachers and save animals around the world. There is no time to waste.

Product Watch

Worldwide mobility in the Internet of Things era

TraceME

KCS has extended its successful TraceME product line with an advanced module, targeted for worldwide mobility in the Internet of Things era. The latest development of the TraceME GPS/GPRS Track and Trace module combines the RF location based positioning solution with the LoRa technology.

This combination offers ‘smart objects’ being even smarter, since LoRa enables long range, battery friendly communication in a wide variety of (M2M) applications. The module will be available in Q2/2015 and other variants in the high/ mid-range and budget-line will follow shortly after.

Features: • Supporting GPRS/SMS and optional 3G • Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, • ANT/ANT+ and iBeacon support

Phase One Industrial, manufacturer and provider of medium format aerial digital photography equipment and software solutions, recently announced the launch of Phase One iXU 180 camera, the world’s smallest 80 MP medium format aerial camera.

The camera is easily integrated into new or existing setups with its USB 3.0 connectivity for storage and control, and direct communication to GPS/IMU systems.

Forward motion compensation is also available as an option.

Features: • 80 MP CCD sensor • Weighs less than 950 grams • USB 3.0 connectivity for storage and control • Schneider-Kreuznach fast sync lenses • Leaf shutter speed: up to 1/1600 second

Geospatial World / April 2015 / 47

SPECTRA PRECISION

Smallest and lightest aerial camera

Product Watch

Trimble recently introduced the latest embedded UHF RFID module in its ThingMagic Mercury 6e series — the ThingMagic Nano. ThingMagic Nano delivers the smallest form factor for a Mercury Series embedded UHF RFID module with very low power consumption, and is ideal for battery operated, low-cost, small form-factor portable readers.

It features a surface mount package designed for the efficiency of SMT manufacturing, driving down the total cost for embedding RFID in volume applications, including handheld devices, consumables authentication, device configuration and access control.

Features: • Small size: 22 mm x 26 mm x 3.0 mm • EPCglobal Gen 2 (ISO 18000-6C) • Single 50 Ω connection (board-edge) • Separate read and write levels, command adjustable from 0 dBm to 27 dBm in 0.5 dB steps • 41 board-edge connections providing access to RF, DC power, communication and GPIO signals • Tag read rate of up to 200 tags/second • Maximum tag read distance of up to 10 feet

Precision, performance and productivity Spectra Precision has launched its new FOCUS DL-15 Digital Level. The DL-15 digital level’s electronic height measurement capability provides the accuracy and range for a wide range of survey and construction tasks.

The Spectra Precision FOCUS DL-15 Digital Level provides consistent height measurement precision through an electronic reading of a standard bar code staff to an accuracy of 1.5 mm (0.005 feet). It has in-built data storage and offers a distance measurement range of 100 metres (328 feet).

Features: • Onboard measurement software.

• Simple data transfer from the FOCUS DL-15 via USB cable.

• Resolution height masurement: 1 mm / 0.5 mm • Resolution distance measurement: 0.1 m / 0.01 m • Measurement time: 3 sec

48 / Geospatial World / April 2015

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enough to handle large datasets, it is also very easy to use. Highly automated workflows ensure that you quickly produce exactly the deliverables that your customers need.

Trimble RealWorks offers an industry-leading suite of tools to support all types of scanning jobs. Whether processing a topographic scan or as-builting a complex industrial plant one software gets results quickly and efficiently.

Join the Trimble RealWorks Email Community to learn more: www.trimble.com/TRW

© 2015, Trimble Navigation Limited. All rights reserved. Trimble, the Globe & Triangle logo and RealWorks are trademarks of Trimble Navigation Limited, registered in the United States and in other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. GEO-061 (04/15)

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