The most important variable that impacts a utility is the amount of demand for energy. Utilities must be prepared to increase or decrease the production of energy or gas to keep up with existing demand. Over-producing or under-producing can cost a utility millions of dollars. On the other hand, though, a utility’s primary responsibility is to ensure the delivery of energy or gas to their customers and to control or reduce the number of interruptions in service.
The primary driving factor of demand is, quite simply, the weather. The hotter it is outside, more electricity and less natural gas is required or demanded by the utility customer. Conversely, the cooler it is that trend is reversed. To the uninitiated, this seems like an easy formula to manage. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Weather can be as unpredictable as the Stock Market. That is why utilities depend on many advanced technologies to monitor and forecast the weather. In fact, larger utilities are beginning to employ their own staff of meteorologists.
Of course, the impact of weather affects the various areas of a utility differently. Generation is mostly concerned with forecasted weather. They need to know how hot or cold it’s going to be today and tomorrow in order to efficiently manage load production. The non-regulated marketers also monitor forecasted weather so they are prepared to buy and sell power due to fluctuating demand which is, once again, driven by the weather. Transmission operations monitor weather conditions such as lightning, severe storms and winds. If there is 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, distribution operations monitors radar and lightning to manage field crews. As storms move into the service area, dispatchers need to know where to be prepared to send repair crews and whether or not to pull them off jobs or put off-duty crews on standby.
While GIS offers benefits to virtually every area of the utility, transmission and distribution operations benefit the most with regard to servicing the utility customer. Every line, pole and substation can be easily monitored and managed through the use of GIS. Transmission engineers are responsible for delivering the proper amount of energy to all the areas of service while distribution engineers manage the delivery of energy to the end user. With the use of GIS, engineers can pinpoint the exact location where service is required.
Esri and DTN Weather Services worked diligently together to develop a process whereby realtime and forecast weather information to be combined with existing Esri platforms. Combining realtime and forecast weather information with GIS has significant potential for improving weather related decision support systems. For power generation, forecast weather information derived from state of the art numerical weather prediction models at the National Center for Environmental Prediction in Washington D.C. are now available in Esri grid formats. One potential use of this type of data would be the generation of population and industry density-weighted calculations of energy load versus forecast temperature for a potentially more realistic energy load forecast. Improved energy load forecasts help avoid power shortages and allow utilities to be more competitive when buying/selling excess power on the national grid.
Lightning data is critical to transmission and distribution engineers. Available in Esri Shapefile format, engineers can track lightning-related problems along transmission lines. Radar data, equally important to utilities, is available in Esri Polygon format. Storms that are in a utility’s service area can be monitored and tracked in near-realtime since radar data is updated every 5 minutes. And since the attributes of each storm cell are available, as well, utilities can monitor speed and direction, intensity, presence and size of hail, and presence of possible tornadic activity. Radar data also differentiates between rain, snow and rain/snow mix so transmission engineers can monitor lines for icing effects near a rain/snow line.
GIS-ready weather data from DTN Weather Services is available today via high-speed communications satellite delivery in conjunction with a properly configured DTN MetWork Fileserver. MetWork converts the raw weather data into Esri GIS formats as selected by the user. Formats available include Esri point shapefiles, polygon shapefiles and grids. Many GIS-ready geo-referenced bitmap images of weather information are also available. The weather data can then be accessed over a Local Area Network and/or sent via FTP directly to specific GIS users on the LAN.
DTN Weather Services became an official Esri business partner in 1996 and the two companies continue to work together to provide solutions to weather related problems that can benefit from GIS technology. DTN Weather Services will continually increase the amount and variety of weather information that will be available in GIS-ready formats. Therefore, utilities now have one more tool to use to manage load production and power transmission and distribution. Furthermore, the utility also maximizes the value of their existing weather and GIS systems.