Operational Intelligence for Water Utilities Operations Management

In May, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) released its 2022 Summer Reliability Assessment, which is a preview of expected bulk power conditions and system reliability… There is often an insightful story hidden in the data which will tells you how you are operating the business, and the objective of data analysis is… Access this ScottMadden article to learn about key considerations for potential market participants. The evolution of energy markets presents financial and operational benefits for participating utilities. In this section, we look at developments in New York’s Reforming the Energy https://californianetdaily.com/the-best-windows-10-antivirus-software/ Vision proceedings and the increasingly blurry line between traditionally clearly defined federal and state… In this section of the Energy Industry Update, we explain how new distributed energy technology, customer preferences, and new participants are impacting utilities and the traditional regulatory…

Databricks has the governance and security in place to meet strict cybersecurity and IP protection requirements. Not having a centralized way to govern data can lead to data loss, unauthorized access, and increased costs. In a traditional technology landscape many of these systems are brought into a legacy data warehouse to reduce silos and enable cross functional reporting and analytics. These changes have accelerated recently with the rapid growth of renewable generation, increased regulatory scrutiny, and more frequent extreme weather events. With access to a real-time operational view of activities, customer service staff can quickly provide accurate information, improving customer engagements.

This dashboard provides real-time insights into revenue and average revenue per user (ARPU) trends, comparing monthly performance against the previous year to highlight growth and seasonal patterns. Utilities companies can swiftly adapt to new inquiries by expanding existing dashboards or creating new ones. A well-developed dashboard system enables deeper insights into public utilities-specific metrics such as operating expenses, capital expenditures on infrastructure, and performance ratios across different service areas. Many utilities hold a wealth of data that often remains underutilized due to time constraints or the limitations of traditional spreadsheet analysis and accounting systems. Dashboards enable organizations to visualize trends in revenue, customer growth, expense allocation, and operational metrics.

It’s More Than Structure, It’s Strategy

• Capital spending by U.S. investor-owned electric utilities has steadily increased over the past decade, a trend expected to continue.
• Regulatory reporting (Consumer Confidence Reports, PFAS monitoring reports, Surface Water Treatment Rule compliance) requires querying the full operational data history in a standard interface.
• This enables both administrators and teams in the field to take a proactive approach to providing service.
• Number of customers, MWh electricity sales, and revenues by customer type.
• Modern visualization software, like Power BI and Tableau, can transform manual, spreadsheet-heavy processes into automated, streamlined dashboards and reports to help drive results.

This data is correlated with both a GIS (Geographical Information System) and a rules-based map of the network itself. In many implementations, data on the utility network is reported via both customer call and device-level sensors. They are also helping provide more accurate, timely, and information-rich customer communication than ever before. To meet this challenge, utility companies are increasingly turning to utility analytics. This crucial task means responding in the wake of major storms, pinpointing equipment failures, carefully connecting customer-reported outages with the relevant part of the network, and much more. Utilities face the challenge of managing complex infrastructure and are charged with providing customers with the most reliable service possible.

• Utilities companies can swiftly adapt to new inquiries by expanding existing dashboards or creating new ones.
• As decarbonization efforts have proliferated, electric vehicles (EVs) are widely seen as essential to meeting state and local clean energy goals.
• Now with the PI System, all authorized LADWP personnel have direct access to this information 24/7, from anywhere that they can connect to the internet.
• Together, data from these systems is capable of providing an extremely robust view of what’s happening on the distribution grid – and what’s likely to happen in the coming hours and days.
• In a traditional technology landscape many of these systems are brought into a legacy data warehouse to reduce silos and enable cross functional reporting and analytics.

Gain insight into managing growing IBR penetration, RTO/ISO market reform, and modernizing your operational tools and workforce training. Our history and deep understanding of the energy value chain will help you transform to meet the https://power-at-work.com/get-the-job-done-understanding-your-earthmoving-machinery/ needs of your customers, your regulators, and your stakeholders. Having helped our utility clients meet their most difficult challenges for more than 40 years, we have both the experience and the expertise to help you succeed in this shifting landscape. The regulatory model is shifting to accommodate new assets and ways of operating the electric and gas systems.

Real-World Applications of Utility Data Management

Finally, preparing for data center-driven load growth requires more than just predicting a single outcome. Ultimately, physical grid operations, market dynamics, and financial performance must be evaluated within a unified analytical framework. Under conditions of highly uncertain, time-compressed load growth, this approach increases risks related to capital efficiency, reliability, and rate setting. Utilities must be able to compare scenarios quickly using different load forecasts, in order to quantify the least-cost scenario given market uncertainty and risk-premium valuation. Thus, without careful planning, rapid load growth can increase near-term fossil dispatch, delay coal retirements (especially in areas where state and/or federal policy supports it), and drive emergency thermal capacity additions. As data centers enter the picture, reliability planning must extend beyond planning reserve margins to operational stress testing under extreme conditions.

The ability to collect, analyze, and act on vast amounts of data is transforming how utilities operate, improving efficiency, reducing downtime, and enhancing overall grid performance. Most utility businesses use software like a network management system (NMS) and/or an outage management system (OMS) to collect and store incoming data. Utility analytics dashboards help gather relevant metrics and aggregate them into a user-friendly interface for utility decision-makers. Companies that fall short in managing and leveraging the deluge of data may find it increasingly difficult to meet the needs of their internal and external customers.”

• This democratization of data and analytics has not only increased the use of data across the utility estate, but it has increased LADWP’s situational awareness.
• In May, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) released its 2022 Summer Reliability Assessment, which is a preview of expected bulk power conditions and system reliability…
• The data is then organized into subject areas, such as sales, marketing, or operations, and stored in a way that enables fast and easy querying and analysis.
• That kind of consumption data – segmented by the hour or more frequent intervals – is powerful in the hands of someone like Pasi Miettinen, CEO of Sagewell, a software company and consultancy specializing in analytics for utilities.
• This dashboard provides real-time insights into revenue and average revenue per user (ARPU) trends, comparing monthly performance against the previous year to highlight growth and seasonal patterns.
• In this context, traditional planning frameworks built around gradual load increases and long development timelines have become increasingly misaligned with the speed and uncertainty of today’s data center interconnection requests.

A New Imperative for Utilities to Manage their Unbilled Revenue

As an award-winning, Elite Tier Splunk Partner, Arcus leverages hundreds of Splunk use cases, including deployments, cloud migrations, scalability, and automations to help utilities and energy companies improve performance and help Splunk…splunk better. Splunk correlates real-time events across substations, transformers, and line sensors to identify outage points, using dashboards and GIS maps to show affected areas and employing ML to classify outages. The Tennessee Valley Authority uses OSIsoft PI System to monitor hydroelectric plant, nuclear facility, and transmission network performance. The data projects described at the beginning of this post are major efforts by utilities meeting specific business needs. Ascend provides energy market stakeholders with the clarity and confidence to successfully navigate the rapidly shifting energy landscape.

Enhance program and customer engagement

A list of states that each utility operates in, including capacity owned in state, capacity operated in state, and energy sales in state. Number of interruptions and minutes of outage for customers of each utility by state and outage conditions (under major events or normal conditions). Capacity, generation, capacity factor, fuel consumption, and emissions of CO2, NOx, and SOx for each generator owned by each utility, and for power purchased by each utility. Rate base, equity, debt, returns, earnings, interest expense, tax expense, and the rates of return used for earnings and revenue calculations. Number of customers, MWh electricity sales, and revenues by customer type. Right now, Hong said, many utilities do not have sufficiently accurate load profiles.