One of the challenges faced by large utilities with multiple GIS, outage management, customer information and other systems, which are often the result of mergers, is how to make spatial and associated data, in different, […]
Vegetation is a significant source of outages for many utilities. In some regions from one quarter to one half of all outages can be ascribed to vegetation. Vegetation encroachment initiated the massive North American northeastern […]
Duquesne Light is typical of many of North American small to medium electric power utilities. It does not have an outage management system or an electrical data model which means it is difficult to connect customers […]
Yesterday at Distributech 2018 in San Antonio I listened to a talk from a consulting company contracted by an electric power utility to clean up GIS data originally sourced from CAD drawings. This reminded me […]
At Distributech 2016 Zarko Sumic, Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, predicted that by 2020, the largest energy company in the world (by market cap) will not own any network (grid) or generation assets. By analogy with […]
At Utility University at Distributech 2018 Joseph Nichols, a Project Manager at Burns and McDonnell, made the interesting case that over the period 2013 to 2016 there was a trend of increasing failure spend but […]
AECOM is a US$18.2 billion a year firm in the construction sector. It designs and builds infrastructure around the world for public- and private-sector clients including transportation, facilities, environmental, energy, oil and gas, water, high-rise […]
Since Google Earth’s release in June 2005, the rise of crowdsourced OpenStreetMap, the deluge of remote-sensed imagery from private satellite companies Digital Globe, Planet Labs, UrtheCast, and others, and private geospatial data companies like HERE, […]