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Matt Chester
Matt Chester
Energy Central Team
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ON-DEMAND: Lessons from ADMS & DERMS Roadmap Implementation [an Energy Central PowerTalk™ with UDC & Partners]

Energy Central PowerTalks are 20-30 minute pre-recorded video and/or audio sessions focused on case study stories, white paper research, or topics that we feel may interest the community.

In this PowerTalk "Lessons from ADMS & DERMS Roadmap Implementation," Tom Helmer, Executive Solution Architect at UDC, and Alex Lionakis, Electrical Engineer at CORE Electric Cooperative, discuss with Energy Central's Community Manager, Matt Chester, the successes and opportunities for learning that came from their process of developing a roadmap for CORE's ADMS and DERMS future.

 

Tune in now! 

If you prefer to listen to this talk, see below for our podcast links.

In the comments section at the end of this post, please feel free to ask questions, add comments, etc. If you have questions, the Energy Central Community Management team will do their best to get answers from the presenters and other community members.

Key Links

UDC's Energy Central Page

 

Interviewees

Image Attachment

Tom Helmer, Executive Solution Architect at UDC

Alex Lionakis, Electrical Engineer at CORE Electric Cooperative

 

Related Topic Posts on Energy Central

 

PowerTalk Transcript

Matt Chester:

Hello, my name is Matt Chester, Community Manager at Energy Central. Energy Central is a platform built to help professionals in the utility industry to share, learn, and connect in a collaborative environment. Our Power Talks series is a short 20 to 30 minute prerecorded video session designed to bring together some of the leading voices on given topics that we feel are of interest to the power sector widely, and of specifically our energycentral.com community members. We invite our members to interact with these Power Talks sessions afterwards by leaving their comments and questions on the posts, and then our Power Talks participants will respond to those so that the conversation could continue on an ongoing basis.

Now I'm pleased to kick off today's Power Talks session with a duo of esteemed guests. This Power Talks series focuses on case studies of projects and implementations across the utility space, identifying what the takeaways, lessons, and forward-looking best practices are for peers in the utility sector to replicate success or avoid pitfalls.

Today we're fortunate enough to have two participants as a part of the conversation, one from the utility side and one from the utility partner perspective. So I'm excited first to welcome Alex Lionakis, Electrical Engineer at CORE Electric Cooperative. Thank you for joining us today, Alex.

 

Alex Lionakis:

Thanks, Matt.

 

Matt Chester:

Great. And likewise, I'm excited that we're joined on this Power Talk by Tom Helmer, Executive Solution Architect at UDC Inc. Thank you for being here, Tom.

 

Tom Helmer:

Thank you, Matt. I just wanted to add, I've been UDC's Executive Solution Architect for about nine years. Been helping folks with their ADMS roadmaps, business cases, vendor selections for about 15, and have been helping folks with their energy delivery implementations for about the last 30 years. So I've been at this for a while.

 

Matt Chester:

Wonderful. We're excited to hear more of your expertise based on all of that experience. And as I noted, we focus these Power Talks on case studies to make sure that they're grounded in practical learning that can come from them. And in this instance, UDC and CORE recently collaborated to put together an ADMS and DERMS roadmap for CORE Electric Cooperative. So Alex, I want to start with you to see if you can set the stage first US here. What was the background around CORE seeking to put together this type of a roadmap?

 

Alex Lionakis:

Thanks, Matt. CORE has a history of investing in technology to improve the reliability of the electrical distribution network that we own and operate. Deploying an advanced distribution management system or ADMS, it's a multi-year project requiring cross discipline coordination and a well-thought-out plan. So this was the main reason we reached out to UDC to develop our roadmap. We've already invested in advanced metering infrastructure or AMI smart meters and substation SCADA and ADMS is the next stage of building out a fully interconnected electrical distribution system.

 

Matt Chester:

Great. And so as you started to put together a game plan for this initiative, can you outline what were your main goals that you had defined ahead of time and how were you in a forward-looking way trying to define what a successful end state would end up being?

 

Alex Lionakis:

Yeah, our main goal for these initiatives were to improve system reliability, safety and interoperability between devices. We have multiple wildfire mitigation programs in place currently, and we wanted to enhance those programs by offering more technology through ADMS.

So our current plan is focused around a lot of traditional methods such as enhanced inspection, such as like periodic inspection of overhead lines, vegetation management, like proactive and reliability based trimming of vegetation in the vicinity of overhead lines and system hardening efforts such as insulated conductors, replacement of hydraulic re-closers, and we're experimenting with non expulsion fuses as well.

So getting into some of the benefits of ADMS, the safety benefits by wildfire prevention would be improved system visibility. So by installing sensors along power lines, we'll be able to monitor system conditions at a more granular level, which will allow us to identify and locate faults more rapidly. In addition to that, from an interoperability perspective, being able to interface with loads and generation will further enable us to effectively manage our system.

 

Matt Chester:

Great. And it sounds like you had everything very well-defined at the beginning. And so Tom, I'd like to bring you in at this part of the conversation. Where did UDC become involved? And from your perspective, what did you see as the main challenges of the project from the beginning?

 

Tom Helmer:

Alex reached out to UDC because of a longtime colleague of mine actually was helping them with some of their EMI MDMS deployment. Probably the first challenge always is to have Alex and all of our clients understand our methodology. And we really need to get more than just operations involved. So we try to get a number of lines of businesses that are going to get value, either from the data, the processing, or historically potentially from the data as well.

So getting that large group together together is a big challenge. And then the other piece was we started a little bit late in the calendar year and we wanted to get it done in the calendar year. So Alex and team did a great job getting the business centric workshops all scheduled in a timely fashion, well attended, so we could actually get the roadmap completed by the year-end. Thanks.

 

Matt Chester:

Excellent. And Alex, as you listen to that, were there any additional challenges that you saw from the CORE side?

 

Alex Lionakis:

Yeah, Tom basically laid it out very well. And to Tom's point about being in a time crunch, he was really proactive in getting these workshops scheduled and coordinated and very flexible too because obviously we're trying to pull together multiple team members from different departments. And so there were a lot of scheduling constraints around that. And so Tom's workshops were essential for bringing together those different departments across our organization. And since ADMS is a system of systems that will impact our entire company, it was very beneficial to hold those workshops and Tom led those workshops in a way to get everyone on the same page to make sure all stakeholders had a say.

 

Matt Chester:

Right. And it sounds like everything was very well planned from the beginning, but now let's shift to walking through the actual process of developing the roadmap. And I'd obviously love to hear from both of you on this, but maybe we'll start with Tom. Do you want to give an overview for how you approach this to kick it off from the outside vendor perspective?

 

Tom Helmer:

Sure. I've had the pleasure of helping people, like I said, for about 15 years now. So our methodology for doing these is pretty well tuned. We like to do an introduction of what's commercially available today from the ADMS and DERMS space. And I like to get the clients to tell me either their vernacular or for them to understand mine. Because before we start the workshops, it's really important that we're on the same page from a terminology point of view and an expectation point of view. Because there's a lot of applications now that are being developed and we want to make sure that we have a good inventory of them all and we can go through and get a good priority in terms of things that are human in the loop usually come first. Things that are semi-automated or could have a human in the loop are usually second.

And then things that are fully automated, fully optimized issuing SCADA commands based on the results that usually is coming in last in our ordering. So as we go through and do these workshops, and again, they're very business centric, we try to put them in the nomenclature of CORE using their business systems, using their swim lanes and showing the high value integrations that are needed to get the full value out of the best terms.

So that's what we go through and build out the deployment plan or roadmap. We call them business releases. And based on CORE's priorities and ability to adapt change we came up with eight business releases currently is the game plan. So we're very pragmatic. The first four are turning on ADMS functionality. The next one will turn on DERMS.

The next one after that is kind of optional. If DERMS brings together everything they really want from a demand side or demand response point of view, probably don't need it, but did put in another business release just because [inaudible 00:09:54] vendors and DERMS vendors aren't quite the same. I mean I know they're kind of merging, but I wanted to make sure based on using the systems, have some timing in the schedule to make sure we can adopt more customer demand response if that's the goal.

And then the last two are really takING advantage of all that great data now that they're collecting and using it in more of an advanced asset management point of view to help manage the modern grid a bit better as well. Thanks.

 

Matt Chester:

Great. Yeah, thanks for that Tom. And now Alex, from your perspective, how did you and your team manage the process and ensure the project continue to move along towards your desired outcomes?

 

Alex Lionakis:

Yeah, as Tom mentioned, we just completed this roadmap at the end of last year. So we are in business release one right now and looking ahead at all those future business releases. And to get to this point, the communication between departments within CORE was essential to ensure that all stakeholders had a chance to participate in the development of that roadmap. And stakeholders across different departments within CORE were involved in the development of the roadmap.

We were also aware that many other utilities are much further along in the process of developing their ADMS platforms and might be willing to share their experiences and lessons learned. And Tom was really helpful in getting us in contact with former clients and other industry contacts he had in the utility world to have those conversations. And I learned a lot in these discussions with people from their previous experiences. For example, when selecting a software vendor, I learned that we need to confirm the vendor's product development roadmap aligns with the goals of our internal roadmap for ADMS. There might be functionality that we plan to implement that may not align with a certain vendor which could cause problems.

 

Matt Chester:

Yeah, it's interesting. And you mentioned lessons learned and so I kind of want to keep on that theme and see were there any particular roadblocks that came up that were unexpected that you didn't see coming based on previous experience or other examples you had seen? And I'd love to open this up to either of you to share any of your perspectives about whether the challenges that you did come across these roadblocks, were they unique to how CORE operates as an electric cooperative or were they comparable to what you would expect another form of utility might come across?

 

Alex Lionakis:

I think it's probably common because even though there are some common problems, even though we're sort of deep into it as an industry, the technology has matured a bit from what Tom has told me from where it was say 10 years ago. I think still one of the main challenges a lot of people in my similar position might encounter is personally with a lack of knowledge of the complexity of implementing an ADMS.

Just based on my background, I tended to think of it primarily from a hardware level. And I didn't have an appreciation of the complexities around modeling, the software implementation, the data, the quantity of data involved and the business impacts involved, right? Because it is a across organization system. So there's business impacts. Fortunately CORE is committed to developing a realistic roadmap and has been very supportive of this project. So they've given me the opportunity to learn and put me in contact with people like Tom to help support the program in general.

 

Tom Helmer:

Yeah, I would say I didn't really hit any roadblocks at CORE. I would almost say it was probably the opposite. They had deployed already a very nice OMS system that has grown in to an ADMS system. The vendor's been bought and the new ownership actually is really progressive. They're actually issuing a release a month to catch up and they really wanted to be a leader in functionality.

So in previous vendor evals, they were a bit slow, maybe two or three years on releases and now they're coming up with functionality pretty much every month to the market. So it's pretty impressive. From a pragmatic point of view this allows CORE to turn on modules as they want. The module built process is in place and that may highlight there may be data missing.

Now, the model built process is designed to feed outage prediction and generate customer counts. Being able to do unbalanced low flows needs a lot more data. So we'll see if that information is existing in the enterprise systems at CORE, but just gives them a nice sandbox to turn on functionality. And from a user experience it's going to be the same user interface. So in the op center it should be very well adopted and used as modules get turned on.

 

Matt Chester:

Yeah, that's interesting. And Tom, I like hearing you say that they have the sandbox now, and kind of leads into my next question, which is, it sounds like there's been fairly successful outcomes from this endeavor, but I have to imagine that it's not the end of the process completely and it's kind of more or less just the beginning. So Alex, I'd love if you could share what really comes next from here.

 

Alex Lionakis:

You're right, Matt. It is really just the beginning for us. We expect many challenges to come from what we've learned through the roadmapping process. So there'll be technical, logistical, economic, supply chain, the whole gamut of challenges. One of the first tactical challenges we'll be working on is the creation of an electrical model for our distribution system.

So we have an existing electrical models we use for planning processes, but they'll be new model that's going to be foundational to our fully optimized ADMS based on our GIS model. So what they might call a utility network model, I guess most utilities probably don't have this level of electrical modeling of their system. So creating an accurate electrical model is, it's a large task in itself that involves taking a detailed inventory of all over current devices, regulators, re-closers, conductors on your system. Once that data collection is completed then we need to implement systems and processes to maintain the accuracy of that model as the system grows and changes.

These changes will need to flow through different departments such as engineering, GIS, operations, and finally into an ADMS system and the components of that system such as unbalanced load flow. It's a coordinated effort that requires quite a bit of planning to execute properly. Other processes that are running concurrently to the electrical model development are lab testing of field hardware such as mesh radios, cellular radios, and line sensors, which are the networking paths that constitute our OT network. We're also working with our IT department to create a network architecture to support integration of these new systems while maintaining appropriate separation between our NERC CIP security perimeters and this new OT environment.

 

Matt Chester:

Excellent. Well, Tom and Alex, this has been a great Power Talks session and it's so compelling to hear their perspective you each have from a slightly different vantage point in this process. So I'm sure the Energy Central community will have further questions that they wish I had asked you guys. So if that's the case, I'll again encourage them to post them in the comments on Energy Central's Power Talks post, and I know both of you'll be open to keeping that conversation going with them. But once again, thank you for joining me today.

 

Tom Helmer:

Thank you, Matt. It definitely has been a pleasure working with a client as progressive as CORE is, and I look forward to helping them implement hopefully some of their business releases. And again, thanks Energy Central for having me on this Power Talk.

 

Alex Lionakis:

Yeah, thanks Matt. Thanks for having us on and thanks again Tom for your support through this process.

 

Tom Helmer:

Yep, thank you.

 

Matt Chester:

Wonderful. And thanks. Lastly to all those who are watching or listening in, stay tuned for future editions of the Energy Central Power Talks series as well.

 

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