www.energycentral.com ENERGYBIZ 57 www.energycentral.com ENERGYBIZ 57 Asset MAnAgeMent guidebook « READ REGULARLY UPDATED INFORMATION ABOUT ASSET MANAGEMENT: WWW.ENERGYCENTRAL.COM/AM.CFM The Promise of Video Surveillance CON EDISON TAPS NEW TOOLS BY SALVATORE SALAMONE AS UTILITY COMPANIES INCREASE the number of substations and distributed generation facilities they operate to meet the growing and varied energy demands of their customers, they are also considering the security of those facilities. Many of these sites — even the ones in urban areas — are in remote and isolated locations. The majority of these facilities is unstaffed. While concern grows about terrorist and cyber- attacks on the country’s electrical infrastructure, the bulk of the security problems these facilities are likely to encounter will come from common vandals and thieves intent on destroying or stealing property. To help improve the security of its sites, Con Edison, through its urban utility center, has under- taken a program to test and pilot sophisticated video surveillance systems that would be the company’s eyes on the street in these facilities. “We wanted to find an inexpensive alternative to existing intrusion detection systems,” said Thomas Paratore, a systems specialist in Con Edison’s corporate security services group. At the beginning of the effort, the first choice was whether or not the solution should include video. Con Edison determined that there should be video to assist when an intrusion was detected. That set in motion a search for a solution with specific criteria
guidebook «READ REGULARLY UPDATED INFORMATION ABOUT ASSET MANAGEMENT: WWW.ENERGYCENTRAL.COM/AM.CFM
The Promise of Video SurveillanceCon Edison Taps nEw Tools
By salvaTorE salamonE
As utility compAnies increAse the number of substations and distributed
generation facilities they operate to meet the growing and varied energy demands of their customers, they are also considering the security of those facilities.
Many of these sites — even the ones in urban areas — are in remote and isolated locations. The majority of these facilities is unstaffed.
While concern grows about terrorist and cyber-attacks on the country’s electrical infrastructure, the bulk of the security problems these facilities are likely to encounter will come from common vandals and thieves intent on destroying or stealing property.
To help improve the security of its sites, Con Edison, through its urban utility center, has under-taken a program to test and pilot sophisticated video surveillance systems that would be the company’s eyes on the street in these facilities.
“We wanted to find an inexpensive alternative to existing intrusion detection systems,” said Thomas Paratore, a systems specialist in Con Edison’s corporate security services group.
At the beginning of the effort, the first choice was whether or not the solution should include video. Con Edison determined that there should be video to assist when an intrusion was detected. That set in motion a search for a solution with specific criteria
ESRI Helps Southern Company Gain theGeographic Advantage Across the Enterprise
“We used ESRI ArcGIS extensively during the storm. I cannot imagine being able to coordinate the more than 9,000 people we had work-ing without using ArcGIS. We were able to put our
staff to work ef� ciently and provide management-level
data virtually on the � y.”
Louis H. Occhi, Mississippi Power
Southern Company’s TransView Appplication provides systemwide query and work design for all � ve operating companies.
Mississippi Power easily manages important data
such as Hurricane Katrina’s damage potential in their
service territory.
GIS shows speci� c poles, wires, and materials inspection data.
ESRI Helps Southern Company Gain theGeographic Advantage Across the Enterprise
“We used ESRI ArcGIS extensively during the storm. I cannot imagine being able to coordinate the more than 9,000 people we had work-ing without using ArcGIS. We were able to put our
staff to work ef� ciently and provide management-level
data virtually on the � y.”
Louis H. Occhi, Mississippi Power
Southern Company’s TransView Appplication provides systemwide query and work design for all � ve operating companies.
Mississippi Power easily manages important data
such as Hurricane Katrina’s damage potential in their
service territory.
GIS shows speci� c poles, wires, and materials inspection data.
Southern Company, a super-regional energy company and one
of the largest producers of electricity in the United States, relies
on the ESRI® ArcGIS® integrated family of geographic informa-
tion system (GIS) software to run its business. Whether managing
26,000 employees, serving over 4.2 million customers, or
restoring power to affected customers after Hurricane Katrina
in 12 days, Southern Company relies on the world’s leading GIS.
All four operating companies of Southern
Company—Alabama Power, Georgia
Power, Gulf Power, and Mississippi
Power—use ArcGIS across the enterprise for analysis,
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cost containment, and pro� tability. The information is accessible
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ESRI’s family of ArcGIS software provides Southern Company with the geographic advantage to
of information.
To learn more about implementing enterprise GIS, contact ESRI today at 1-888-333-2938 or
visit www.esri.com/electricgas.
I_SoCoEnterprise_L0408.indd 1 6/9/08 7:54:37 AM
58 energybiz July/August 2008
including the ability to detect an intrusion in real-time and a price under $500 per site.
With that as the foundation, tests began using a beta product — the WiseEye from Israeli security company EMZA Visual Sense. One appealing feature of the product was that it had built-in image analysis. This is in contrast to many other video surveillance systems where the system collects the images and transmits them to a computer or server where the actual image analysis is performed. Obviously, one advantage of having the unit perform the analysis is that no additional computer is necessary.
The eye of the device looks down a virtual line to a perimeter that is intended to be monitored. This might be a gate to an outdoor facility or the exterior door to a building.
The system’s fairly sophisticated analytics software can differentiate between a car, person, and other objects. When it detects an object, it knows how big a person would be at a particular distance along its line of sight. Such features can help eliminate false alarms when, for example, a dog might run in front of a fence or the wind blows a trash bag into the line of sight.
According to EMZA, each unit learns its normal environment, detects and analyzes changes, and sends only clear alerts with outlined images to the central monitoring station for follow up. And rather than sending video or images all the time, the system starts sending a digital image in jpg format every half-second once motion is detected. This reduces the bandwidth needed to support a video surveillance effort.
The initial product was tested for one year. Con Edison offered suggestions on ways to improve the device. The company then received a second version of the product to use in a formal pilot program. The new system offered improved image resolution and could better withstand the weather if placed outdoors.
Still, one drawback to such systems is that this type of equipment requires power and a data cable. This can drive up the cost to use video surveillance since it is frequently quite expensive to run cable and power to a device in a remote station.
The current version of the WiseEye touted on EMZA’s Web site is entirely autonomous with a built-in power supply and ability to transmit images without using a cable.
Paratore noted that video surveillance is intended to complement other security systems in place. Con Ed would not go into detail about what these systems are except to say the company takes a multi-layer security approach.
So what role will video surveillance play? “We use a deter, detect, and respond approach to security,” said Paratore. Video surveillance falls under the “detect” category and its intended use is for alerting purposes.
However, once video equipment is installed, other nonsecurity applications are also being considered. For instance, while there is a move to use key grid element equipment that can be monitored remotely — such equipment has digitized supervisory control and data acquisition information — much of the installed base of equipment in substations and distributed generation sites still relies on analog meters.
Naturally, most of this equipment can send an alarm when, for example, equipment operates out of its intended range. A person on site can quickly see this is the case when a needle on a gauge goes into a red zone. If no person is on site, there is an idea of using video equipment to perhaps scan the equip-ment meters to identify a stressed device before it goes out of its operational bounds and the needle moves into the red zone. In such an application, nonscheduled preventive maintenance could be performed to prevent an unplanned outage.
» guidebook (ASSET MANAGEMENT)
We use a deTer, deTeCT, and respond approaCh To security.
Utilities are facing lean times. Fuel prices are volatile, the costs of materials are rising, and consumers want the best service for the best price. To meet these challenges, utilities must use their resources wisely – which is why many of them are turning to enterprise asset management software. The value of this software extends far beyond its ability to help utilities meet their asset utilization goals. The true payback of the software comes from its support of additional business functions such as project planning, procurement, and inventory management.
For most people, enterprise asset management means work or asset life-cycle tracking. But today’s asset management soft-ware offers much more. It supports all the business processes required for the maintenance and repair of expensive assets. This leads to a better and more efficient use of those assets, which ultimately translates into profitability and improved cus-tomer satisfaction.
Consider, for example, the procurement and inventory man-agement functions associated with asset maintenance and repair. When asset-centric businesses such as utilities talk about supply chain, they are basically referring to the process of supplying spare parts to planned work tasks. In a utility, supply-ing spare parts can take up a large portion of inventory spending – and an equally large portion of the procurement team’s time. A more efficient procurement process can eliminate costly work delays, reduce the cost of creating a purchase order, and lower the costs related to retaining excess inventory.
energen uses integrated technOlOgy
tO iMprOVe planning and prOcureMent
Energen Corporation is a diversified energy holding company headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. A large part of Energen’s business is the acquisition and develop-ment of domestic onshore natural gas, oil, and natural gas liquids reserves. Like all utilities, the company wrestles with the key challenge of reducing operating costs while improving efficiency and maximizing shareholder value.
Historically, Energen employees generated handwritten orders for plant maintenance and project tasks. The project approval process required multiple reviews of paper maps and typewritten forms. Energen supported this manual work-plan-ning process with a manual procurement process that offered limited visibility into work or project requirements.
The company decided to take an integrated approach to planning and procurement and began searching for a way to help effect the change. After a comprehensive selection process, they chose SAP® software. Energen was influenced by the utility-specific functionality of the software and by SAP’s strong utility customer references.
a change fOr the better
With committed executive management support, the soft-ware implementation was completed in only nine months – on time, on scope, and on budget. Almost immediately, Energen realized benefits in the areas of plant maintenance, project systems, and supply-chain management. As expected, the shift to an online approval process allows project approvals to come through within a few hours.
The integrated software also provides real-time cost visibility for projects and maintenance tasks. This allows the storeroom to better plan for material needs and has cut storage costs in half.
The purchasing department, too, realized immediate benefits. An automated bid process has led to a 60% to 70% efficiency improvement in managing vendor bids. And implementation of the purchase-to-pay functionality with document imaging has increased the speed of the purchase order creation process by 75%. “We used to get lots of calls from vendors about their PO status every week. With support for the procure-to-pay process, those calls are fewer than before,” says Michael Lunsford, manager of distribution and engineering for Alagasco, one of the two operating units of Energen Corporation and the largest natural gas utility in Alabama.
As growth continues, Energen plans to evaluate and inte-grate other supporting enterprise asset management pro-cesses including mobile enterprise asset management and fleet maintenance. Says Brunson White, vice president and CIO at Energen, “Today, it is hard to imagine what life would have been without SAP.”
enterprise asset Management: helping utilities Cope in a Tough Market
More Than Just Work Management
An automated bid process has led Energen to a 60% to 70% efficiency improvement in managing vendor bids. And implementation of the purchase-to-pay functionality with document imaging has increased the speed of the purchase order creation process by 75%.
60 energybiz July/August 2008
it’s time to wAke up And smell the wind farms. And the solar fields, the wave
beds, and the transmission lines needed to trans-port electricity from these new resources. Despite concerns over “regulatory uncertainty” around climate change, the general direction is clear: Sustainability is here to stay.
Nearly 30 states have renewable portfolio stan-dards in place in one form or another and initiatives are also on the table in Washington and throughout the Canadian provinces to address climate change more specifically. Expectations are rising that the electric industry in North America will begin to reduce carbon emissions and integrate higher percentages of renewable resources into its genera-tion mix over the coming years.
Urgent action is needed, however, to maintain reliability as we move into the carbon-free fast lane. Demand is projected to rise 20 percent over the next 10 years, while “committed” supply is only expected to rise by 10 percent over the same period, according to NERC’s 2007 Long-Term Reliability Assessment.
Demand is on the rise and showing no signs of stopping. The old adage of keeping the lights on is now an inadequate description of the industry’s charge as new uses for electricity continue to multiply. Flat-screen televisions move aside: Even a toothbrush has a charger these days.
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and other emerg-ing technologies may seem distant today, but are quickly coming down the pike as well and don’t generally show up in the load forecasts. As it relates
to carbon controls, it’s much easier, for example, to regulate emissions and operations at a power plant than it is to control what comes out of the tailpipes of millions of automobiles.
It is clear that future generations will continue to rely on electric infrastructure to enable greater effi-ciencies and improve their lifestyles. But without new resources to generate, transmit, deliver, and manage the energy needed to power these new innovations, we might as well go back to square one.
When you think about it, meeting a 20 percent rise in demand over the next 10 years effectively means we’ll need one new power plant for every five we have today, one new substation for every five, one mile of new transmission for every five, one new demand response switch for every five. Or we will need to make great strides in efficiency and resource manage-ment — a 20 percent improvement in the efficiency of refrigerators, air conditioners, and motors, for example.
It’s widely understood and accepted that our indus-try is on the brink of one of the largest construction phases in its history, but it’s clear that current trends in resource development are not sustainable — both from an environmental and a reliability perspective. It can easily be argued that we’re to the point at which the question is no longer what kind of resources we should build, because we need them all. Nuclear, coal, natural gas, wind, solar, wave, biomass, efficiency, demand response — you name it, we need it.
Diversification is key, however, and while the growing reliance on natural gas (spawned, in part, from a general reluctance to build coal and a volun-tary moratorium on nuclear) may have provided the industry with short-term gains, it will soon lead to long-term impacts if the trend continues. On-shore natural gas supplies will be stretched thin over the next decade with increases in home heating and industrial applications. While liquefied natural gas is expected to provide new supplies, terminals have been delayed and concern remains over exposing the industry to a global market that could quickly start to look like its petroleum-based counterpart.
the superhighwAy
Like natural gas, renewables are also drawing interest. But we are seeing some of the positive energy behind renewable proposals being lost when
The Superhighway to SustainabilityBy riCk p. sErgEl
the transmission lines needed to connect those resources to the grid are raised. Transmission will be the backbone of our energy future. We need a clean energy superhighway that will move energy from where the wind blows, the sun shines, and the waves roll to where consumers live and work.
In addition to the poles and wires, we also need the technologies to monitor flows on the system in real time and give operators the time and visibility to correct issues before they affect consumers. Synchro-phasors and other smart grid tools are breaking new ground in these areas already, but we also need better forecasting methodologies, more
verification and tracking of demand response, and a better understanding of how new resources are responding to disturbances.
The superhighway to sustainability is out there today in many forward-looking proposals and plan-ning sessions. We all must work together to educate our stakeholders and support policies that ensure the backbone for future development is strong and the speed limit is high. The superhighway has the potential to bring many benefits to our industry, such as lower costs, improved reliability, and more security from both physical and cyber threats.
For our part, NERC will be working to support climate change initiatives by acting as the voice of reliability, ensuring that concise and understandable information is made available to legislators and policy makers as the debates go on over our energy future.
NERC has sent out a request for input on the reliability impacts of climate change initiatives to the industry for comment. NERC will compile these responses and publish a summary checklist of reli-ability concerns to support climate change initiatives within the next several months.
Rick P. Sergel is president and chief executive offi cer of the North American Electric Reliability Corp.
Researcher, writer, analyst and consultant, Warren B. Causey has worked with technology for more than 30 years and specialized in utilities since the early 1990’s. Causey is one of the most respected experts in energy.
The Asset Management & MobileSolutions Report is part of the SierraEnergy Group Report Series. Thiscomprehensive report includes results fromboth a broad-based industry survey andtargeted interviews. It also contains in-depthanalysis from Warren Causey. Topics covered inthe report include:
An overview of where utilities are in managing • their assetsAre fixed assets connected to mobile assets? • Do utilities have enough assets to meet demand? • How bad is the “aging assets” problem? • What do utilities need to meet the demands being placed • on them?
The Asset Management & Mobile Solutions Report provides a “strategic snapshot” of the issues that are driving and impactinghow utilities are managing their assets.
Purchase this report for only $495.00.
Purchase more reports in the Series:Three Reports - $1,195.00 Full Year of Reports (12) - $4,695.00
Look
for the Sierra
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Webcast on Asset
Management & Mobile
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Registration opens July 9th.
The Asset Management & MobileSolutions Report Energy Group Report Series. Thiscomprehensive report includes results fromboth a broad-based industry survey andtargeted interviews. It also contains in-depthanalysis from Warren Causey. Topics covered inthe report include:
•
• • • •
The Asset Management & Mobile Solutions Report provides a “strategic snapshot” of the issues that are driving and impacting
The Sierra Energy Group Report Series is a publication of Sierra Energy Group a
to sAy utilities Are Asset-heAvy operations and that many of those assets are
aging is a cliché in today’s world. What can be classed as assets range from massively complex conventional and nuclear generating plants and hydroelectric dams, to widely dispersed transmission and distribution systems, down to trucks, meters, tools and sophisti-cated computer systems overlaying it all.
For nearly 20 years now, increasingly sophisti-cated software systems designed to help utilities track and maintain their far-flung assets have been available on the market and growing more capable from year to year. Many utilities have installed these packaged enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise asset management (EAM) and other related systems. Some utilities have reached the point where they are fairly confident that they have a handle on what usually is called simply asset management. But this is by no means unanimous, according to a new survey by Sierra Energy Group, the research and analysis division of Energy Central.
In fact, only 44 percent of all utilities have a dedicated asset-management software solution. That percentage goes up sharply among the 200 or so large, investor-owned utilities, but drops among mostly smaller municipal, federal, state and district utilities.
Most utility assets were designed and built to be long-lived. However, the rapid growth of the U.S. economy since World War II required utilities to build many new systems and expansions, especially on the transmission and distribution side, leaving less money to replace assets as they grew older.
Now, utilities face a host of new problems such as escalating fuel prices, environmental issues, renewable energy mandates, aging workforces, and legislative and regulatory uncertainty. As a result, they are not going to have extra resources to replace assets that are nearing or beyond the end of their anticipated lifecycles.
Dealing with the aging asset problem calls for a sophisticated management approach. Fortunately, they have the tools for such an approach in modern asset management and financial systems. They
also have several models that have worked well for utilities in their nuclear plants and elsewhere.
A holistic approach to asset management — one that links to financials, supply chain and related systems — enables utilities to monitor and respond to changing asset conditions over time, and not have to respond in a crisis mode to the aging asset issue. This is the best hope they have for dealing with assets while also trying to meet the current raft of demands they face.
Several utilities, including First Energy, Northwestern Energy and others, already are adopting these methods. The entire lifecycle of an asset must be considered, including its associated financial and supply attributes in order to deal with the problem. The tools for dealing with aging utility assets are available. Not everyone is using them, however, and time is running out. A good indication of the difficulties they face can be found in the following list of top problems reported in a recent survey.
New residential and commercial development
Aging utility personnel and loss of corporate memory
Aged assets
Future generating capacity
Availability of spare parts
Equipment failures
Accurate count and location of assets
Too many outsiders tend to view the utility industry as monolithic so that one solution fits all. It is far from that ideal. Different utilities in different parts of the country, under different regulatory and ownership structures, built out their assets very differently. Now they are being forced by regulatory fiat to comply with new mandates, such as a certain percentage of renewable energy — and possibly the next challenge for the industry, carbon caps — with aging technology that varies widely and that is not very well tracked in many cases, especially at smaller utilities. It’s a recipe for disaster, many industry insiders believe. There is a wide disparity in how utilities maintain asset information.
Utilities obviously don’t have the resources to go out and replace equipment that was installed 50 years ago and still functions well. Instead, they need to adopt a comprehensive model-based approach to dealing with these aging assets. That way they become a normal part of doing business and don’t represent yet another crisis to deal with. There will be enough of those over the next few years.
