Electricity / Interview Requisites for smooth functioning of utilities W hat do you think are the biggest challenges the electric power utility sector is facing, especially with respect to smart grid? Smart grid is interesting as well as necessary, but from my observations, the real challenges fall into a handful of related categories such as inspection, maintenance and reconstruction, labour force changes and supply/demand management. The crucial ones are, of course, inspections, maintenance and reconstruction since infrastructure — not only the equipment, but the structures — is ageing. And an enormous amount of capital is being pumped in to keep up. This is exacerbated by weather pattern changes. Much of the evidence for this is apocryphal, but I know of two large customers (one of our regular ones), who have had massive inspection programmes to mitigate weather related infrastructure damage. Significant unpredicted outag- es due to ice and salt take the load off conductors. The weather problem isn’t strictly related to the age of the infra- structure, and inspections have to adapt to weather patterns, weather events and proactively inspect equipment that’s at highest risk. The labour force issue is also impacting utilities for long now and much system knowledge is retiring. Risk was 34 / Geospatial World / April 2015 Up-close with Stephen Brockwell, President, Brockwell IT, Geoff Zeiss - Editor, Energy and Building finds out how electric utilities are taking stock of challenges and adopting new technologies by integrating spatial data mitigated by people who know system, the lines and the transformers and had 30 years’ experience in keeping it op- erating. With the loss of that knowledge, it’s not clear if there are systems in place to replace them. Spatial data has a role in this, but it’s not sufficient. Big data and learning systems can mitigate some of it, but those are massive investments that are complex to implement. I don’t think most utilities have been completely successful when implementing predictive maintenance as part of asset management. Many have pro- grammes to put it in place. Supply and demand management are made vastly more complex by diversity of energy sources and opening the grid to different generation and consumption patterns. The real-time and big-data systems manage the data for these pat- ters are not fully evolved from what I can see. What are the key IT technologies, especially location-aware that are contributing in transforming the electric power industry ? When it comes to the assessment of field conditions in emergency and maintenance situations, good old-fashioned GPS and its increasing position is ubiquitous. But reality capture using LIDAR and other technologies has enormous promise as well. Massively detailed information about a site