Electricity / Case study more power to electric utilities Trey Price, Electric Engineering GIS Analyst, Denton Municipal Electric throws light on the need to embrace GIS as one of the core ‘utility grade’ technologies T he advent of the electric utility, at the turn of the 20 th century, brought in a significant change to the way people lived their lives. Lights could be turned on at night, large factories could operate large powered machinery and people had access to easier sources of home heating, cooling besides, of course, the Internet. Technology has improved and changed. The paradigm has begun to shift on how energy is delivered to the home or office. Electric utilities have changed significantly too. Combined factors give way to a storm of opportunity for geospatially aware technology to bridge the gaps in the way electric utilities operate. Challenges for electric utilities The old model would place all the emphasis on Customer Information System (CIS) without much spatial awareness of the grid. The CIS is still an important tool for the electric utility, but Geographic Information Systems (GIS) integrated to utilities’ CIS, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and AMI systems puts more power into the operational and supervisory staff of an electric utility. Systems such as AMI and SCADA need to have the geospatial awareness that GIS brings to the table. The state of Texas has had an interesting set of challenges for its electric utility. The state market is divided into the deregulated investor owned market, the cooperative owned system and the municipality owned model. The city of Denton, Texas operates its own municipal electric utility – Denton Municipal Electric (DME). Located north of Dallas and Fort Worth, Denton is a full service city, operating the electric utility as well as water, wastewater, and landfill services. Utility Grade is one term that is used more often at DME to describe how the business is. The GIS department at DME has a primary goal of providing with ‘Utility Grade’ geospatial and technology services. This also means that GIS has been identified as one of the core technologies for the electric utili- ty. The GIS at DME is also one of the ‘Utility Grade’ systems alongside the CIS, SCADA and AMI systems. For over 10 years, DME has been using an Esri ArcGIS based solution with Schneider Electric’sArcFM and recently has implement- ed a few new products to enhance the goals of the utility in the 21 st century. And GIS has also been integrated with the CIS, SCADA, and Integrated Voice Recognition (IVR) systems. GIS gives out spatial location to each department at DME. System Operations ensure that they safely dispatch crews to outages or to address trouble calls from citizens. The crews rely heavily on ArcFM Viewer for ArcGIS Engine map, so that they can view their location in the DME system and use a built-in GPS receiver in their laptops to track their Utility Grade geospatial technology was driving the way that the users did work on a day-to-day basis 30 / Geospatial World / April 2015