FERC vs NERC: A grid control showdown over cyber security

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WWW.INTELLIGENTUTILITY.COM /// JULY/AUGUST 2011
40
Location is imperative
+ + Geospatial data is central to Hydro One smart grid
By Nargis Ladha and Erik Shepard
HYDRO ONE IS THE ELECTRICITY PROVIDER FOR A LARGE
proportion of Ontario and serves approximately 1.3 million rural
customers, with a service territory nearly twice the size of Texas, comprised
of 17,771 miles of transmission circuits, 76,429 miles of distribution circuits
and more than 2 million poles.
Because of this large service territory, field inventory of distribution assets
or conversion of paper maps was deemed cost prohibitive, and the geographic
information system (GIS) has historically focused largely on transmission assets,
with some tactical support for distribution assets (predominantly focused on
new designs and maintenance of a simplified schematic power system model
for grid operations).
New topographical model for distribution assets
Hydro One has regulatory requirements to field-inspect all distribution system
assets on a six-year asset condition assessment cycle. At the initiation of the last
cycle, in 2005, determination was made that for a marginal additional cost, field
collection could also collect GPS location and asset attributes to form the foundation
for constructing a GIS for distribution assets as well. GIS technicians perform
post-processing on this field data to
integrate network topology, resulting
in a spatially and topologically accurate
model for distribution assets. At present,
more than 95 percent of the distribution
system has been completed.
The biggest challenge to leveraging
the existing asset condition assessment
program has been that the fieldcollected
data used to construct the
distribution model may be as much
as six years out of date. Fortunately,
Hydro One has current data, albeit
with spatial accuracy and completeness
challenges, in the tactical design
and grid operations distribution
GIS databases.
The design database is spatially
accurate, but only reflects new construction
work and is not a complete
representation of the network. The
grid operations database is complete,
but focuses on the network connectivity,
excludes structures such as poles
and pads, and is not spatially accurate.
The consolidation of these two tactical