Here Comes the Smart Grid
Senior operations Executives address the Challenges ahead

By Warren Causey // photos by Dianne Brogan

Senior Operating Officers
Miguel Ortega
Director, ComEd
Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.

Terry Varn
Manager, Transmission Region
Operations, Technical Support,
American Electric Power
Columbus, Ohio

Raymond Rauber
Vice President of Engineering
& Operations, Enersource
Mississauga, Canada

Jacob Chacko
Director, Business Operations,
Xcel Energy
Minneapolis, Minn.

Kerry Teetor
Manager of Operations,
Dawson Public Power
Lexington, Neb.

Brian Daschbach
Senior Vice President,
Integrated Field Services, BgE
Baltimore, Md.

Robert Linahan
general Manager,
Springfield Utility Board
Springfield, Ore.

Mark Eades
Chief Operations Officer,
Johnson City Power Board
Johnson City, Tenn.

UTILITY OPERATIONAL EXECUTIVES, INCLUDING CHIEF
operating officers, vice presidents of operations and others, are well
aware of the intelligent utility enterprise and smart grid movements
sweeping the industry. But they also say it’s probably coming more
slowly than many who see an impending energy crisis looming in the
United States and the rest of the world would hope.

Utilities remain somewhat crippled with respect to embracing a
digital transformation because operations and engineering still operate
as a separate silo from the information technology function. Increasingly,
information technology managers seek to install more highly
unified systems across the enterprise. Unfortunately, many operations
executives continue to look upon IT as a support function, instead of
seeing IT as keeping information derived from real-time systems and
enterprise systems. When operations executives overlook the advantages
of fully integrated information systems, they risk coming up
short of the tools they will need in the near future to deal with many
pressing issues.
 

Many people are proposing visions of the
intelligent utility enterprise and smart grid as partial
solutions for many of the problems that the industry
is facing right now, including demand explosion and
supply constraints. This implies that utilities will
become more real-time all the way from the grid to the
boardroom. Is your utility working to link real-time
data from the field with the enterprise systems to enable
an intelligent utility?

Ortega Yes. In the last year or two there’s been a lot
of discussion around the smart grid. That term is pretty
common at the table now and we’ve sat with many a
vendor to discuss it. But it’s very much in the initial
stages of what each is doing and where they are. One
thing we’ve struggled with is who has the lead. Is it
IT, operations, or engineering? Why isn’t engineering
taking the lead? Is IT support for engineering? It’s all
those kind of issues we’re discussing.

Varn Six months ago, we started a formal group
within the organization for an initiative called grid
smart. We’re looking at several diff erent ways to try to
tackle some of the issues. Th ere’s a group that works
on self-healing distribution systems. Each one of the
major groups within the grid smart initiative is headed
by at least a director level and the executive sponsor is
an executive vice president over the utility group who’s
right next to the chair.

Rauber I think we’re in the same kind of mold of
thinking about the intelligent utility. I don’t see it necessarily
as being something new. Running grids and operating
them are evolving. Th e utilities and the power systems can
become more intelligent. Pushing real-time data to the back
office probably will be farther down the road.

Chacko In March, we announced what we call our
Smart grid City initiative in Boulder, Colo. We are
planning to have about 10,000 to 15,000 smart meters
in place by August. What we’re planning to do is
convert two of our substations and fi ve feeders into an
import called a smart substation project. Also, at the
invitation of customers, we’re going to be installing
in-home programmable devices that we can, hopefully,
use to fully automate home energy use. Our plan is
to have this first phase done by August and then have
the entire city on board and completed by the end of
2009. Then we will have conversations with the state,
and the regulatory officials, to consider a potential
larger deployment in the rest of our eight-state service
territory.

Linahan We’re a small utility with 31,000 electric
meters. We’re a customer-owned utility, very conservative.
We’re always looking at the new technology and trying
to pencil it out for a business case, but in many ways, it
doesn’t work. Th e most we’ve been able to do is to look at
automatic drive-by metering just from the standpoint of
access issues, dog problems, safety, things of that nature.
But to do a full deployment just doesn’t pencil out because
we have over a thousand customers per square mile.

ENERGYBIZ Is your organization focused on achieving
greater reliability?

Teetor
Daschbach
Chacko
Eades
 

To us, that is very much a customer dependent
consideration. If we have a customer in our
system that would require such a high reliability level
that they would come to us and say, “We must have
this type of reliability,” then we would pursue it. I do
not know that we would pursue it without having the
request brought to us.

Linahan We put in automatic transfer switches if
the customer requests it and we’re capable of doing it.
The first run is usually easy, the second one a little bit
more difficult, and the nth one is not always available,
and that is one of the big issues. When you’re looking
at planning your capacity, all of a sudden if you lose
a feeder and maybe you have a big load that transfers
to another one, you could burn down your circuit, so
it’s a little bit of an operating problem. So we don’t
want to get into automated switching too much. We
normally have about 185 outages a year, and most of
them are individual homes that one person, a lineman,
can go out and take care of. Very seldom do we have a
feeder issue, and when you look at adding all this stuff it’s a lot
of resources. You’re talking about lots of bucks. When you’re
looking at self-healing, you’re looking at a lot of cost, you’re looking
at requiring a pretty good engineer to be in tune with all that stuff ,
and what happens if he leaves?

Daschbach We’re in the Baltimore-Washington corridor,
and we have a large customer base that is either government
agencies or contractors that support the defense community.
The idea of duplicate feeds and automatic changeover is very
commonplace for us, so we have many customers with two
feeds from different sources and a changeover at their location.
Our service operators, our first responding linemen,
are skilled at dealing with those issues when it comes
down to putting the system back to normal again.
To introduce artificial intelligence and to have the
system operate itself is a place that we’re trying to go.
But frankly, we’ve had communications difficulties
between those units trying to talk to each other and
come up with a safe and reliable scheme. Feeder-level
automation is still pretty control-room based. We’re
just sort of teetering. We’re looking at having artifi cial
intelligence doing the feeder-level switching.

Teetor Our customers mainly are rural. We do have
two ethanol plants on our transmission system that

take service from us. The ethanol plants are the biggest
ones that need dual feed, and they push that pretty
hard. At this point, the one that we serve is just on a
radial, but we have capability, or we’ve built into it two
10-megavolt ampere transformers that can switch back
and forth. So it’s not really a dual feed for transmission.
It’s a dual feed for the distribution. I’d like to
see us have some more smart switches out there that
have automated transfer, especially around some of our
bigger cities.

TO INTRODUCE
ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE AND
TO HAVE THE SYSTEM
OPERATE ITSELF IS
A PLACE THAT WE’RE
TRYING TO GO.
Leadership Roundtables
 

ENERGYBIZ One of the issues that has become
prominent in the industry is the division of information
between real-time and back-office systems. You have
real time in operations and engineering departments.
Then you have information technology and the back
office and those have been called silos. Are those silos
breaking down at your utility?

Ortega The short answer’s yes. There’s more communication,
but there’s still an opportunity to improve that. I think our real-time
group has bridges with a lot of the back office. They work
with the ops people plus the IT people who give the line-up
for support, which they all do, frankly. So I think the short
answer is yes.

Varn A couple of states that we serve are regulated, and
information sharing is somewhat restricted. We have some rules
that we have to follow, certain compliance rules. In general,
though, within the rest of the organization, I don’t see any
limitation on information that’s shared — none whatsoever.

Rauber In the past, just the nature of the groups, the realtime
and operations information haven’t necessarily come
together with the back-office side. But as this new technology
comes along, it’s definitely bringing about a coming together.
That’s not really a breakdown of silos, it’s just
that the two groups need each other to each accomplish
what they need to get done and they come together to
do so. At least that’s what we’re finding. It’s been new,
and it takes a little getting used to, getting to know
some different people, that sort of thing. But I think it’s
both sides seeing what has to be done if you’re going to
be customer focused. If each side sees how it works for
better customer service, then they chip in.

Chacko I think so. Back in 2002, we created a data
warehouse, and that kind of helped us in breaking
down some of these IT silos. We have our geographic
information systems leveraged into this common
database repository. We have a work-management
system that’s tied into the warehouse. Depending on
what I need, I can call the person in charge of the data
warehouse and ask for a report, and I will have gobs of
information coming out. We have that on the gas and
electric side. That’s one of the ways we have been able to
get around the silo mentality.
... OUR
REAL-TIME
GROUP HAS
BRIDGES
WITH A
LOT OF
THE BACK
OFFICE.
Leadership Roundtables

Utility operational executives, including chief operating officers, vice presidents of operations and others, are well aware of the intelligent utility enterprise and smart grid movements sweeping the industry. But they also say it's probably coming more slowly than many who see an impending energy crisis. Read a wide-ranging Leadership Roundtable with COOs in the July/August issue of EnergyBiz magazine, viewable online at www.EnergyBizmagazine.com.
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EnergyBiz Magazine - July 23, 2008