Low Cost Applications for Leveraging your GIS Investment
Gary Duplisea
Bangor Hydro
P.O. Box 932
33 State Street
Bangor, Maine 04402
Abstract
Most of the attention of an electric utility GIS implementation is focused on the big ticket items such as data conversion, the data model, hardware, outage management, and work management. These items are the most costly and visible aspects of the project. The success of the project typically depends on their outcome. However, there are many opportunities for implementing relatively low cost applications which can provide an immediate benefit to the enterprise. This paper examines some low cost applications that Bangor Hydro has implemented and the benefits that have been achieved. These applications are used daily by Bangor Hydro personnel and have resulted in improving employee and operations efficiency. We will examine the effort required to implement these applications, how they are utilized, and the benefits that have been achieved.
Overview
Bangor Hydro is a small electric utility located in central and eastern Maine. Our service territory is mostly rural: approximately 110,000 customers over 5000 square miles. We began implementing our GIS in 1994 by constructing a data model and doing a field data collection of all our facilities and customer locations. Our data collection effort was completed in 1998. We spent a significant amount of money on data collection and data cleanup. We have also implemented two very costly end user applications: an Outage Management System and a Construction Design application. These expensive ventures have provided significant benefits to BHE. In addition to these projects, we have also implemented numerous low-cost applications which in their own right have provided significant benefits. Some of these applications were not part of our original project plan. As our users and project team members became accustomed to GIS, and the benefits of spatial information were realized, ideas of new ways to utilize this information became reality.
My objective of this paper is to bring about an awareness of the various uses of spatial data in an electric utility. By being creative and listening to users’ suggestions, you can leverage more value from your GIS system. I will attempt to do this by presenting examples of some of the applications that we have implemented.
Landbase
As I mentioned before, Bangor Hydro’s service territory is very rural. Combined with the fact that over 99% of our facilities are overhead, we concluded that an extremely accurate (and therefore expensive) landbase was not required. We decided that the USGS 1:24000 quad DLG’s would be adequate. This data was very affordable and the +/- 40 foot accuracy satisfied our needs. We developed a landbase data model, a DLG loader and imported the data successfully. The DLG data include road, waterway, and political boundary locations. What was lacking from this data, however, were road name attributes. Without road names, it was often cumbersome for users to determine the map location in the GIS. We solved this problem with data we already had.
First, some background: We collected the GPS coordinate for all our electric meter locations. We call this a "demand point". Each demand point has a unique ID. A new field was added to the Service table in our Customer Information System (CIS) Database that indicated the demand point ID of each customer’s service account. This data was then imported into the GIS DB in the form of a Customer table.
