Intelligent Utility Jan-Feb 2013

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Knowing those issues can be vital if a cooperative has
borrowed money for equipment. There are detailed guidelines
on inspecting equipment for U.S. borrowers, and those
guidelines require documentation. So, the GIS serves as a
repository for this vital inspection
data, keeping all of it in a
With paper maps,
central location.
But, centralization isn’t the only
the crew’s maps
benefit of GIS. On the opposite
end of the spectrum, the mobile
were outdated
aspect of GIS is just as valuable,
according to Richert and Metheny.
the day after they
So, GIS has made the lives of
field crews significantly easier,
were printed ...” especially in outage situations.
Dispatchers now know where
the crews are in the field and which crew is closest to the
outage. More significantly, GIS can track a utility’s best
asset: the consumer.
Hicks revealed that a utility he worked for prior to his
current stint with the NRECA has the GIS tied into the accounting
system with map locations associated with customers.
In a single-case scenario, the consumer calls in an
outage, the outage management system (OMS) answers the
call, identifies the phone number and links it to an account
number (which is automatically linked to a map location
number, resulting in the location popping up on the map).
Additionally, if multiple consumers call in, the system can
roll up the data together in a bundle along with asset and
map information and predict locations for the outage. If,
for example, five people on the same single-phase line call
and report an outage, the system could predict the nearest
up-line device with a problem, such as a fuse or a recloser.
That’s invaluable, active, immediate information that would
have taken much longer before this positive GIS creep across
utility systems.
At MVEC in Iowa, the utility has a real-time interface between
GIS and the customer information system enabled by
NRECA’s MultiSpeak standard, allowing up-to-date consumer
details to be available to crews in the field. Along with
the consumer connection, the GIS interfaces with several
other utility subsets: electronic staking, system engineering
model, outage management system, AMI, mobile mapping
for both field and office use, automated vehicle location.
At DMEA in Colorado, the GIS system is being utilized
to design new facilities, model existing and planned facilities,
and help troubleshoot during outage or during other
operational issues. Additionally, DMEA is using GIS to locate
faults using short-circuit data (fault currents) from
substation devices immediately after events to create more
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