Nova Scotia Power is the province’s main electricity provider, serving 490,000 residential and business customers. To deliver better service, the utility built OneGIS, a Web portal that leverages ESRI’s geographic information system (GIS) technology. The solution, which centralizes all of the utility’s spatial asset data and makes it accessible throughout the organization, allows them to better manage their distribution network and deliver more reliable service. In recognition of its outstanding technology application, ESRI Canada yesterday presented Nova Scotia Power with an Award of Excellence in GIS.
“For utilities to operate intelligently, they need to synthesize the various information they manage and share it across their enterprise to enable coordinated planning and decision-making,” says Alex Miller, president, ESRI Canada. “Utilities should be able to track at all times if their assets are working at an optimal level and take quick action to resolve any network interruptions. OneGIS provides Nova Scotia Power with a complete picture of their network, allowing them to better understand their network and improve outage restoration. Being proactive is a key advantage that will help them provide better service and speed their transformation into a utility of tomorrow.”
Previously, Nova Scotia Power had limited enterprise access to data, with some data existing in spreadsheets. Using ESRI’s ArcGIS, Freeance mobile and smartphone technologies, the utility validated information on all their field assets and created an accurate digital model of their network. Now, they have gained the ability to visualize the location of all their assets. They also integrated distribution, transmission, vegetation and customer data, and will soon add outage information into the GIS portal. The integrated system allows them to analyze numerous aspects of their operations and determine their impact on service reliability. The vision is to be able to analyze line clearing data with historical and current outage information to check the effectiveness of their vegetation management program.
To extend the data to users across departments, the utility developed the OneGIS portal using ArcGIS for Server and the ArcGIS API for Flex. The portal allows staff to query the network and conduct geographic analysis. Now, engineers and operational managers can immediately pinpoint the location and impact of outages by visualizing the power distribution topology along with critical asset information.
“Every customer-facing business function we perform involves location-based information,” says Greg Reinhardt, manager of projects and systems support, Nova Scotia Power. “Centralizing this information into one GIS helps us to operate more efficiently. It used to take several hours for our users to analyze tabular data and identify network risks. Now, using Web maps, this process only takes minutes. This helps us to effectively minimize and shorten outages, enhancing our ability to deliver exceptional customer service. At the same time, the system allows us to operate and plan future projects sustainably.”
Researchers can now visualize potential routes for transmission lines, identify potential hazards and complete suitability studies for the utility’s clean energy projects by accessing the portal. This includes the Lower Churchill generation project, which will harness hydroelectric energy from Labrador’s Churchill River to supply renewable energy to the province. The system also enables researchers to overlay diverse datasets and apply buffers to accurately identify optimal sites for new wind farms.
“To implement OneGIS successfully, we used the best technology for building an enterprise GIS and incorporated marketing, capacity planning and governance into our strategy. We’ve seen increased efficiencies from using the system and consider it an important technology for supporting our growth,” says Mr. Reinhardt.
For more information on ESRI’s ArcGIS technology, visit esricanada.com/products/arcgis.
