Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/801555
Consultancy view - GIS Geographical information system (GIS) technology creates accessible visual models of geographical data. Its use in the utilities sector represents a major leap forward through the technology's ability to visualise, question, analyse, and interpret data; to understand relationships, patterns and trends. The utilities sector over the past number of years has been moving towards a closer alignment between their delivery outcomes and service, and what the customer desires, says Barry Middleton, power and utilities director at PwC. "GIS supports that strategy." Middleton explains: "It's giving a geographical view of where a company's assets are, how they are performing, what condition they are in, what work is being performed on those assets. A spatial view of that and understanding where your customers are aligned to that is becoming increasingly important. It plays to the whole agenda around analytics as companies drive efficiency." GIS is an important component of an eco- system of technologies. "If you're going to drive data collection out amongst the field force then the GIS system also needs to be coupled with their mobile technology so workers can go in and update the GIS systems." "If you couple GIS together with analytics and a really strong enterprise asset management and work management system, you've got the three key pillars for driving customer-driven asset plans, efficient and optimised asset management plans and work arrangements. You've got all the analytics to understand what risks might exist and how that might impact your customers." How does Middleton see GIS evolving? "The maturity of the system's use and the technology which provides the information to the user will no doubt speed up and get better and better. But utilities have got to get better at using this stuff and that means back to back with the big data agenda of handling bigger information volumes either centrally or in the field with more maturity and bringing together datasets and doing analytics around those datasets. "You've got spatial visualisation of information but if you couple that with where we're going with the Internet of Things, better sensor data, using robotics to analyse that information together and then being able to remotely control assets… "You might get incremental improvement by doing a bit more around GIS, or a bit more around sensor information and remote control of assets but the power is in bringing those things together." DSR DSR is provided by electricity end-users temporarily changing their electricity demand in the following ways: • Turn-up DSR • DSR by on-site generation For all utilities, transformation and flexibility are not optional as they face the challenges ahead: they are the key to survival. Utility Week Live has identified the 10 most important utilities technologies and 10 industry transformers, as voted for by the industry itself. These technologies and people are fundamentally changing the shape and look of the utilities sector, including tech innovations that are already a key part of utilities' daily operations, and those whose influence and impact is only going to grow in the coming years. To book your free tickets, visit: www.utilityweeklive.co.uk Current National Grid Reserve Services: • Short Term Operating Reserve must be delivered within 20 minutes and sustained for two hours. National Grid typically procures about 2.8GW of which DSR provides 43%. • Fast Reserve must be delivered in two minutes and sustained for 15 minutes. National Grid procures 0.8GW of which DSR contributes 38%. • Frequency Response must be delivered within 2-30 seconds and maintained for 10-30 minutes. National Grid typically procures 1.2GW with DSR contributing 8%.