Randy Huston of Xcel Energy in Minneapolis spoke about “Smart Grid City”. He introduced Xcel Energy as a “traditionally regulated” utility, and one of the largest worldwide users of renewable energy in the world. They set up a consortium in 2008, including Accenture and its partner TIBCO, to create a SmartGrid iniative.
The 3 big issues for utilities dealing with smart grids are:
- manage increasing data
- leverage existing systems
- extract additional value from this data
An example of this is that newer smartmeters (such as domestic electricity meters) are measuring 8 variables and uploading the information every 15 minutes – compared with traditional meters where one parameters is read manually every 3 months!
Smart Grid City have developed 2 complex event processing applications for:
- Outage Intelligence: use CEP to analyse transformer and meter events (outages, restorations, and communication losses), using the grid state connectivity to correlate events and update the existing Outage Management System. This updates the model where they deduce the problem location from all the complaint calls received – now replaced by the outage events received – and thence determine the “highest level problem” that needs fixing. Using CEP to save 15 minutes for every problem detection.
- Fault Intelligence: putting intelligence – CEP – into the substations themselves to allow them to do things like adjust loads automatically…
So some great, smart grid, CEP use cases here!
