about managing assets and information about assets rather than
protecting revenue or identifying illegal connections.
The various perspectives and requirements of smart grid im-
plementations for the generation, transmission, distribution and
customer sector point of view, rely heavily on accurate and readily
available information about the customers, plant, network connec-
tions, energy sources and sinks, markets, real-time tariffs, network
status, consumption, incidents, smart device location, ‘area of influ-
ence’, and more.
To enable this inter-operability, sufficient emphasis needs to be
placed on the requirement of network information availability and how
the network is connected or related to the various devices in the field.
As a result of this project, eThekwini Electricity has the ability to
perform connected information analysis and unlock full smart grid
requirements. Further enhancements can be implemented to ensure
communication connectivity is also achieved.
Getting your assets under control
Due to various reasons very few entities have all of their asset data
under control, especially at the lower voltage levels. This can be
corrected by:
• Developing and implementing asset and equipment structures
that make sense for your business and systems
• Establishing business processes and workflow that will ensure
any future asset changes are correctly recorded in the relevant
information systems
• Utilising available electronic and hard copy data to capture histori-
cal asset data (the decision to follow this step should be made
based on the quality and control of historical data available)
• Field exercise to capture and update assets with lacking data
Conclusion
Asset management is far greater than simply being compliant with
guidelines such as GRAP17 or IFRS. It gives utilities the opportunity
to really understand, optimally plan, effectively manage, operate
and maintain their assets. Major investment is often made to ensure
reporting on assets is in compliance with regulatory requirements,
take note
SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
EThekwini is located on the east coast of South Africa in the
Province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). The municipality spans an
area of approximately 2 297 km
2
and is home to some 3,5 million
people. It consists of a diverse society which faces various
social, economic, environmental and governance challenges
created by the ever increasing population.
Information is key to unlocking benefits
Proper asset management can only be implemented with good data
about those assets, including its location, technical attributes, dy-
namic attributes and logical attributes. In electrical utilities this is a
big dataset to extend and keep updated with asset counts that could
easily run into the millions. It is impossible to stay in control of your
asset data without proper business processes supported by relevant
information systems influencing asset data.
GNIS information is helpful in providing decision makers strategic
information about the network equipment for example:
• Visual representation of location of all assets
• Visual representation of connections and dependencies of equip-
ment on one another which enables many previously impossible
tasks such as:
o Coordination of maintenance efforts by knowing which
other equipment will be outaged through a scheduled HV
circuit breaker maintenance procedure
o Grouping of outstanding maintenance work-orders by
spatial proximity
o Analysing resources or tools required to perform specific
maintenance tasks
• Accurate tracking of costs such as:
o Installed kilometres of cable
o Correct area calculation for vegetation management along
feeder corridors
• Accurately informing consumers of intended outages based on
connectivity
• Optimising existing transformer capacity through load tracing on
connected networks
• Accurate reallocating of customers and equipment to new
infrastructure is now much simpler. The GNIS allows for the ‘re-
creation’ of the hierarchies through connectivity
• Providing a holistic and visual representation to determine alloca-
tion of resources to specific functions or geographical locations
• Locating and identifying important and sensitive customers and
notifying them of intended outages
Enabling smart grid technology
When analysing the functionality and requirements that utilities place
on smart grid implementation, it is clear that the technology is more
• Knowledge of your assets is crucial in any organisation.
• Asset management is far more than a simple matter of
compliance.
• Systems are available to simplify, but ensure the integrity
of data of field assets.
Electricity+Control
July ‘14
34
