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Pat Hohl and Bill Meehan, renowned bloggers on Energy Central, have amassed an impressive total of half a million views on the platform. With nearly a century of combined experience in the energy industry, including almost half of that time spent working at power companies, their expertise is undeniable. In this engaging podcast series, each episode lasting between 10 to 15 minutes, Pat and Bill take a relaxed approach to exploring the ways utilities can leverage GIS (Geographic Information System) to share, understand, and capture critical utility data.
Contrary to the prevailing perception of GIS as a mere repository for asset information, Bill and Pat will present a fresh perspective. They will delve into the transformative potential of GIS, demonstrating its effectiveness as a powerful tool for engaging with all utility stakeholders. The inaugural episode, titled "Sharing GIS Information," provides a glimpse into how GIS can be harnessed to foster exceptional collaboration and communication within the utility sector. Interested in transforming your utility with GIS? Start here.
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Thanks to the sponsor of this episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast: ESRI
In case you missed it, the full series can be found at these links:
Episode 1
Key Links:
GIS for Electric Utilities from ESRI
Pat Hohl’s Energy Central Profile
Bill Meehan’s Energy Central Profile
TRANSCRIPT
Matt Chester:
Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast. In typical weeks, this podcast features our host Jason Price, interviewing important guests from across the energy sector. But in a fun twist on the format, today you'll hear a conversation directly led by the guests themselves. Regular listeners of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast will also recognize these repeat guests of ours, Bill Meehan and Pat Hohl, both directors at ESRI. Listen in as Bill and Pat talk about unlocking the power of GIS, a topic on which they're leading experts within the EnergyCentral.com community. In this episode, you'll hear a conversation detailing their fresh perspective of how GIS can be used as more than a mere repository for asset information. Enjoy.
Pat Hohl:
Hi, Bill. Welcome to the podcast. I have a question for you. What does engagement mean to you?
Bill Meehan:
Well, thanks, Pat. So what engagement means to me, and for those that know me, I like to think of terms that begin with the same letter. And engagement really means those three Cs, communication, collaboration, and coordination. Of course, we're going to be talking about utilities and of course about GIS. And that's what makes GIS really fun is because it does those three Cs. It allows for communication, just like social media, the immediacy. And of course, because it's based on a map, it really is something that we're so familiar with, so it's communication. Coordination, when you've got crews doing one thing in the field and in the office, it really helps coordination. And collaboration is people working together. So engagement, really for me means people working together, communicating, and collaborating. What does it mean to you, Pat?
Pat Hohl:
Well thanks, Bill. I know that you love that alliteration, but I want you to remember that alliteration almost always annoys. And this is not planned, but the word that comes to mind for me when I think about engagement is connecting. That's the simple-
Bill Meehan:
That's another C.
Pat Hohl:
... It is another C. And to me, that's the simple role of everything that we're talking about here related to engagement. It's a way to connect people that have a common interest, or a common process. And the utility of that could be planning or construction or outages, safety, maintenance, customer connection, any of these things. And I like to think it includes two pieces. The easy part or the easier part maybe is what I call pushing information out to people. Customers need to see an outage map, for example, but it also includes pulling information back from people and allowing them to participate. And so many times when you improve that process that's very manual or paper-intensive these days, it makes the whole situation more enjoyable and much more efficient.
Bill Meehan:
Yeah, I agree with you. The word connection really does summarize it, and I really liked it. So why are we doing this podcast? What's this all about? Well, we thought we would do a couple of short little podcasts, maybe 10 minutes or so on three ideas. And these three ideas have to do with what Pat likes to call sharing, collection, or capturing information and understanding. And as we like to use, and sometimes we hate these term systems, but it's really about a system of engagement, which would be sharing, a system of insight, which would be understanding, a system of records, which is really capturing. So we're going to do a couple of podcasts, three podcasts, about 10 minutes each to talk about each of these concepts. Today we were going to focus on this notion of sharing or engagement or as Pat likes to say, "Connection." So Pat, give me some ideas about things that you have seen or you have experienced because we both worked for power companies for many years, how things just really didn't go so well in terms of engagement.
Pat Hohl:
Yeah, that's a great question. I wrote a blog a couple of years ago about Mylar balloons. And that is my least favorite type of outage because it's so stupid, it's so preventable. When a Mylar balloon goes up into power lines and creates a problem, creates a widespread outage, really that was 100% avoidable. And I remember a number of years ago, we looked at the pattern of where these type of outages were occurring, and they realized we were not communicating well with the customers. And we found that it fell into some discrete neighborhoods where they were very popular. I don't know if they sold them at the local stores there, they must have, but when we communicated with people in those specific neighborhoods about the threats of using Mylar balloons, we decreased the outages significantly. So there's an example of where engagement was poor, but yet again, after we improved it, we saw a nice success.
Bill Meehan:
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great story. And I've had some interesting engagement experiences. But the one that I really found to be the most difficult for me was when I was at a city council meeting in my hometown, actually, where I was being pointed to by some of the residents and citizens who came in because what happened is regularly when the city paves the street, which they really needed because there was a lot of potholes. And then the day or so later, the utility company which I was working for would dig up the street and you'd say, "Well, what went wrong?" I mean, we just not talking to each other. Well, we did. I mean, we gave some information back and forth, but the problem was the mechanism was outdated, it was spreadsheets and maybe six or eight months old. And I mean, things changed over time.
So when I think about engagement for that particular problem, one of our customers has done some really good things. What they have done is actually created a mechanism where the city, the municipality could in fact update the utilities web services, or their utilities GIS, using web services to be able to show where they're paving. And so now you could say, "Okay, where you're paving and where I'm digging. Put it together, it's GIS 101. It's perfect." And having that kind of mechanism in place does require collaboration, communication, connection, and so forth between the municipalities and the utility. I mean, that's really the essence of what I call a smart city. So I think that would be a case of really good engagement. And it of course would've solved the problem. So Pat, you and I have both worked on and worked with customers on success stories. Can you think of some really good customer success stories where engagement was very, very good and using maps and using GIS to do that? I'm sure you can think of some.
Pat Hohl:
I certainly can, and we've written a lot of them in the last few years. As I think about all of these stories, they break down into a couple of categories for me. I think probably the most engaging set of stories is around storm response. This is a time when everybody is stressed, there is damage assessment to be brought in from the field, and all hands on deck gathering this information, text, radio, pieces of paper, forms, and then you have to figure out what it is. And you and I both managed operations when the TV station is on the phone wanting the latest updates, it's very difficult to summarize that information and make any kind of predictions. So I immediately think of Cooperative Energy in Mississippi and their storm center and the way that they automated the damage assessment process and then put a dashboard up in their storm center where they had summarized the information.
And with a modern dashboard, these days is quite easy to put a gas gauge on any indicator and show if it's full, medium, or empty, green, yellow, red, and give people a real-time view of what's happening. But of course, there's many others, as we think about data collection, there's all kinds of data collection processes that occur in utilities, all sorts of inspections. And those things can be really dramatically improved in big utilities and small utilities by making them quicker and bringing that information back in the digital form that can be put to work immediately. Probably my favorite is around safety. Safety is number one at utilities always, and just improving the transparency of the entire safety process of where people are working and what's happening today. Just tremendous opportunities there. How about you?
Bill Meehan:
Yeah, well, I agree with you. The engagement during a storm is so critical because things happen so quickly. And I did a story recently for a utility in Oman, called Majanco. And ironically, you think of these places, they don't get hurricanes or typhoons, but they did. This company and they had a really good GIS, but they hadn't really done mobility with it. And so what they did is, they built or they put in place very quickly, and that was the nice thing about the technology, it went in quickly to be able to engage both the field crews and help that came in. And they were able to really manage that storm quite well. There was flooding, it was pretty serious.
Another one that I kind of like, and in terms of a storm response as well as, and I think safety and storm responses kind of go together when things can really get hairy. There's an initiative around the country called ODIN, it's Outage Data Information Management, where people can figure out, not so much just what's going on in their own territories, which they certainly would, but also what's going on in other areas outside their service territory, which they may not have as much information about. So outages outside there, and particularly in terms of engaging foreign crews, crews that come in to help during a storm, and they could actually figure out, "Oh wait, I'm not going to go to this utility because they're in just as bad shape as we are, would have to go further away to be able to get foreign crews." And it can help manage that process really, really well.
Other areas that I thought engagement was really interesting had to do with things that where information was not really that available. And one of the examples I like is a company in Kenya, it's called KenGen. It's basically the power company of the country of Kenya. And they have all kinds of different kinds of different power plants, and they have lots of renewables and geothermal, it's really interesting, where they created a GIS portal, which is like a dashboard. It's a big dashboard that shows exactly what's going on in this plant, this plant, this plant, this plant. So now they can really manage the load and the generation really, really well. So Pat, those are really great examples. What's the technology? I mean, we're from ESRI. What's the technology that you think can really help a company if they're looking to improve their engagement?
Pat Hohl:
Well, that's a great question. I think there's a couple of ways I'll talk about it in terms of pushing and pulling. For pushing information to people, there's just a host of web-enabled maps and apps, hub sites, put that information on the internet, make it very, very accessible. And then the mobile tools like Survey123. And even tools within field maps now are just so clean for capturing information on the device that people have in their pocket. And as you reference social media in a social media kind of way, pop it right back to everybody else in real-time. I love that.
I wanted to come back to something that you said about mutual aid because when you think about contractors and mutual aid crews and what it takes to engage them when they're on your property, these kinds of tools really are super powerful in improving those kinds of processes and other companies too. I did a story last year on a small co-op in South Carolina and the way that they were using these web-based maps to communicate with their telecommunication companies because they're all involved in broadband initiatives, which results in a lot of joint use, pole attachments, and keeping track of that has always been an issue, but it is getting better.
Bill Meehan:
Yeah.
Pat Hohl:
I see that we're about out of time. Any closing thoughts for us, Bill?
Bill Meehan:
Yeah, I love the fact that you mentioned this technology, it's called ArcGIS Hub, and we see a lot of the wildfires in the western part of the country and look at what's going on in Canada as well. So Hub is one of those absolute collaboration engagement tools where people, the media, the local government, and everybody gets to see what's going on right now. Those are really great. And the last thing I think about engagement would be the term of social equity where people can understand how they can engage with people less fortunate than themselves, especially utilities. They'll be able to see, are we investing in those areas that have an equity issue or are we restoring equitably throughout the service territory. These are great. Yeah, so I think thanks Pat for working with me on this podcast, and again, we look forward to hearing from folks and getting some feedback from folks. And next time we're going to be talking about understanding a system of insight. Well thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.
About Energy Central Podcasts
The ‘Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast’ features conversations with thought leaders in the utility sector. At least twice monthly, we connect with an Energy Central Power Industry Network community member to discuss compelling topics that impact professionals who work in the power industry. Some podcasts may be a continuation of thought-provoking posts or discussions started in the community or with an industry leader that is interested in sharing their expertise and doing a deeper dive into hot topics or issues relevant to the industry.
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