Low Cost Applications for Leveraging your GIS Investment

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.

This data model enabled us to do the following: We wrote a problem to loop through all the records in the road table. For each road record, the program constructed a 150 foot buffer around the road and found all the demand points within that buffer (see illustration below; the demand point locations are indicated by the black squares):

The program then looped through all the demand points inside the buffer, found the associated CIS service records, and constructed a list of all street names from those service records. The program then determined the street name that was most common among the service records and that name was assigned to the road. We then wrote a program to automatically annotate all the roads. Below is an example of the end result:

This was not a perfect solution. Sometimes roads were assigned the wrong value and we had to manually make corrections. However, a few days of programming and testing resulted in named and annotated roads for our landbase. The new improved landbase provided much more valuable information for our users.

Finding Customer Location
Frequently, a big problem for our line crews when making a service call was determining a customer’s location. Often, the address information in our CIS was not adequate for dispatchers to direct crews to the correct location. This resulted in wasted time by our crews driving around trying to locate the customer. By providing GIS to our dispatchers and developing the "Customer Finder", we solved that problem. We used the same data model as illustrated above in the Landbase section to resolve the problem.

The Customer Finder provides several indicies to the customer table (name, name/city, meter number, phone number, etc.). The dispatcher enters the appropriate information, presses the Get button, and the result of the query is displayed. The dispatcher then can select the customer from the list, press the Goto or Pan button, and the GIS map will orient to the chosen customer’s demand point location. With the information on the resulting displayed map, the dispatcher can then direct the line crew to the correct destination. There are several other features of the Customer Finder:

The Sort button allows the dispatcher to select a column and sort the query results by the results in that column.
The Highlight button highlights (i.e., displays in red) the selected customer’s demand point in the map window.
The Output button allows the dispatcher to either print the query results or save it to a file.
Options under the Get button allow the dispatcher to query all the customer on a given line section or all customers within a given area.

This application has evolved over time based on user suggestions. It is now used by numerous departments who need to locate customers and has save countless hours of "windshield time" for our employees to find customers.

Property Tax Records
One of the expenses a utility has is to pay property taxes on all its facilities. In order to do so, utilities must determine what facilities exist in each municipality in its service territory. This can be a daunting task for the Property Accounting department. At Bangor Hydro, accounting personnel spent over two weeks each year updating the previous year’s property records in order to provide facility information for each municipality.

We were approached by a representative of the Property Accounting department and asked if we could provide the information they needed. The request was defined and after a few days of programming we were able to generate the information Property Accounting needed.

The report shows the miles of distribution and transmission for each municipality. The report shows distribution/transmission broken down by numerous categories: single phase, three phase, underground, Bangor Hydro owned, Joint ownership with Verizon, transmission voltage level, etc. The report shows over twenty columns of information for each municipality.

Now, annually, Property Accounting requests the report and we can provide the information on the same day.

Circuit Explorer
Distribution engineers need to know voltage loads, the location of circuits, path taken by each phase of a three phase line, and customers served by sections of circuits. We worked with our engineers to develop a tool that addressed all these needs. The Circuit Explorer allows engineers to have GIS "trace" out a circuit by a selected phase. A "Goto" button will then show a map showing the extent of the trace. Reports can be generated on the results of the trace that show the total number of transformers and their accumulative KVA rating by phase, Customers, and total length of circuit.

Below is an example of the KVA report on a selected circuit. The report shows the quantity and total KVA rating of all transformers by phase.

Prior to this application, engineers would have been required to spend up to several days in the field to ascertain their information. Now, the information is available from their desk within a matter of seconds.

Conclusion
These examples represent only a few of the many lost cost GIS solutions that we have implemented at Bangor Hydro. As you can see, they have provided significant benefits. Another benefit of these applications has been user “buy-in” to GIS technology. By listening to users and implementing their requests, credibility of your GIS increases, not only with users but with management as well. I’ll finish with a couple of recommendations:

Make sure to continually follow-up with the users of your applications to see if they have suggestions for improving the product.
Build time into your project plan to address these yet unknown projects. Even though these "minor" projects can be benefitial, they are difficult to implement in a tight schedule.