Software Improves Efficiency At Distribution Utilities Like Ottawa Hydro
By Michael MacMillan Demand in the electric utility industry for engineering software that can keep up with the rapid pace of changing technology and consumer demand has never been greater. At the same time, software designers must constantly update and improve upon existing software in order to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market.
Ottawa Hydro, typical of many North American distribution utilities, uses a number of different engineering software packages which they depend on to carry out a variety of complex and otherwise time-consuming tasks. To assess what software packages are used on a daily basis, representatives from Ottawa Hydro agreed to discuss the role of engineering software in the day-to-day operation of their departments, and how it has affected their work.
Meter Section
"Our main job is to install and change commercial and residential meters in the field, and that would be your residential house meter right up to our large users," said Steve White, meter section foreman at Ottawa Hydro's Operations Department.
In addition to meter maintenance, the section also performs gas monitor and small instrument repair for other departments.
According to White, much has changed in meter technology since he began in the field. Until about five years ago, Ottawa Hydro and other electric utilities depended on electro-mechanical meters that were remarkably similar to those used at the turn of the century. Today, Ottawa Hydro's largest users (those who regularly consume one megawatt of power or more) are all digitally metered. This in turn has created a demand for specialized software that can instantaneously interpret digital meter data.
"All the software we run is customized software. It's not the big names that you'd know. Software developers have come out with packages...that we need to use to talk to our equipment," he explained.
Multimaster by Schlumberger Industries, White said, is the most important package used in the Meter section on a day-to-day basis. Running on an OS/2 platform on a PC, Multimaster monitors field meters to ensure smooth running, and assists in the data- gathering process necessary for accurate billing.
"We often have an analog meter feeding a digital recorder, and we'll upload the information from the recorder. It's like a translation system interpreting that data, converting it to billing quantities," he added.
Once the data is retrieved, it needs to be simplified and sorted into practical billing information. Monarch, written by Personics, is a software package designed for this very purpose, which for organizes files and data for use on spreadsheets. The chief advantage of Monarch, according to White, is that it essentially un-reports reports.
"It's a software package used for analyzing information...looking for similar qualities. You can set up traps where you can find particular fields in reports in electronic formats and pull up just those fields that you want," he said.
While both Multimaster and Monarch have saved the Meter Section at Ottawa Hydro valuable time, White said that unlike mainstream software which is written with user-friendliness in mind, often designers of custom metering software do not take the end-user into consideration.
"Across the country there are very few users of this type of software," he explained, "so they don't put a lot of engineering costs into it. They get it so that it works, and all the bells and whistles aren't really there."
Operations and Engineering
Don Miller is the Station Engineer for the Operations Division, with experience in the Engineering Department. He says most software used in his department are PC-based packages used primarily to plot out electrical protection curves, making his job much easier.
" It gives us a lot more freedom in trying other alternatives to see if there are other devices that would work better. It's very easy to substitute another relay or fuse and find out very quickly if it works or doesn't work," Miller said.
Of these programs, the most commonly-used is V-PRO, written by Cooper Power Systems. V-PRO, he explained, is an electrical coordination program, used for drawing relay time current curves.
"We use it to do relay/fuse coordination. It allows us to draw the graphs right on the screen, and we can adjust the settings to see how the devices coordinate with each other."
A second Cooper product, V-NET, is also used to assist the department in conducting fault calculations.
According to Miller, however, not all vital functions are carried out on customized software packages. His department also makes extensive use of much more recognizable spreadsheet programs like Lotus 123 and Excel for their budgeting work.
"In order of most used," Miller said, "it would probably be V-PRO...then Excel, and then various other packages. We are getting into a lot of database type applications, and are trying to put together some systems that can keep track of protection device settings and facility information."
Unlike Operations, which depends primarily on graphing software, Engineering tends to make more use of D-Base5 to keep track of customer vault and circuit information.
"We're just coming to the point now where we're linking a lot of these databases together so we can go in and look at a customer transformer vault, and one file will have all the details of the name, description, and where it is," he explained.
Miller is well aware how much technology has changed the nature of the electric utility industry over the years.
"The old method of performing electrical coordination studies meant using a light table and transparency with curves plotted on it," he recalled, "so our turnaround time now is much faster for producing these types of coordination studies. We've improved by a factor of two or three."
Customer Service
While Customer Service relies less on engineering software than other departments at Ottawa Hydro, Raed Abdullah, Senior Energy Advisor, does make extensive use of Lotus 123 to carry out a wide variety of the department's tasks.
"We use it to do everything from on the phone customer analysis to planning the impact of rate changes on customers. We conduct energy management tasks with it, graphing load profiles, calculating load profiles, etc.," Abdullah said.
And rather than customized software designed for specific tasks, Customer Service tends to rely more on mainstream programs like WordPerfect, Ventura, and Corel Graphics -- which are used primarily to produce documents, including newsletters and billing information.
"It's made it easier to serve the customer because it's more automatic -- it's quicker. When we're printing out and presenting to the customer, it's much more professional."
Abdullah's department is also responsible for power quality data analysis. To assist Customer Service with this, Ottawa Hydro has provided them with a Powertech L>