Integrating realtime weather data into the GIS enterprise
How weather impacts a utility
Weather affects the various areas of a utility differently. The effect that weather can have on
service interruptions and the ability of an electric utility to consistently deliver energy to its
customers is well known. The generation group is mostly concerned with forecast weather
conditions. Their requirement is to know how hot or cold it’s going to be today and tomorrow in
order to efficiently manage the production and generation of energy. The non-regulated
marketers also monitor forecast weather so they are prepared to buy and sell power due to
fluctuating demand, often driven by weather conditions. Meanwhile, transmission operations
are on the lookout for adverse weather conditions such as lightning, severe storms and winds. If
there is weather-related damage, or potential for damage, the transmission engineer must be
prepared to re-route energy or dispatch repair crews to return the grid to full operation. Finally,
the distribution operations group monitors weather information, such as radar and lightning
data, to manage field crews. As storms move into the service area, dispatchers need to know
where to be prepared to direct repair crews and whether or not to pull them off jobs or put offduty
crews on standby. New storm tracking technology introduces the ability for an electric
utility to monitor dynamically developing severe weather storm cells for much improved and
more efficient decision-making.
Benefits of GIS
With more precision comes more efficiency, and with more efficiency comes decreased
operational costs. In a nutshell, that is precisely the reason why so many utilities are currently or
migrating toward managing their assets in an enterprise GIS. The enterprise GIS enables
different organizational units within the utility to access, analyze and distribute shared
information about their assets. Further, data ownership can still be maintained and enforced
locally by individual organizations.
Figure 1. Different organizational units in a utility collect, share, and analyze information through an
enterprise GIS.
