Solution Overview
Distribution grid operators need to have more granular spatial and temporal data to manage the dynamic nature of the evolving smart grid. PowerRunner joins data from disparate OT & IT sources such as CIS, MDM and SCADA with external localized weather and real-time market data to support enhanced operational decision management for critical business processes. As smart grid devices permeate electric transmission and distributions systems, the need to harness these IoT data points becomes vital to the security, reliability and efficiency of our electric systems. The PowerRunner Energy Platform is an intuitive business-centric application that joins disparate internal and external, time-series data sources resulting in a single source of accurate analysis across the enterprise to support sub-hourly load factor, power factor, asset loading and coincident peak analysis on all system assets. With drag and drop functionality, business users can create customized analytical applications to support operational and executive dashboards with real time actionable data. With over 20 in production business applications supporting grid ops, system planning, financial analysis, and revenue optimization, PowerRunner provides Utilities with an intuitive platform to extract maximum value from your PI System investment.
The granular spatial and temporal analysis of load, voltage and reactive conditions, along with corresponding event analysis, provides Utility managers with the system visibility needed to manage the growing complexities of the evolving 21st Century Grid, with particular emphasis on grid reliability and resiliency. The intermittent nature of DERs requires near real time net load and generation data for each DER asset. In order to physically integrate these intermittent assets while maintaining system fidelity, grid operators must forecast the net load or generation for all system assets to determine the impact of these interacting micro transactions. The inherent modeling capabilities of PowerRunner provides system planners with a highly-efficient means to dynamically model local resource requirements based upon actual historical and forecasted load, as well as on any DER data for each local circuit. These forecasted localized resource requirement plans inform the grid operator or other market participants of the need for system investments, DER deployments, or a combination of resources to meet local requirements. PowerRunner’s revenue analytics module and rate modeling engine provide grid operators with the applications needed to continually evaluate the impacts of changing revenue models to ensure a sufficient rate of return to the company.
Solution Approach
To address the dynamic and complex challenges of the 21st Century Grid, PowerRunner for the PI system provides Utilities with cross-silo views of disparate data sources to converge OT and IT on a common platform.
The PowerRunner Energy Platform is a unit of measure agnostic solution that operates on any PI System measurement, such as, kW, KVAr, volts, dollars and events tags. Any defined time-series or scalar data elements can be joined and temporally aligned to create point-in-time relationships across these disparate data silos.
In addition to joining and versioning historical data, the powerful PowerRunner forecasting functionality provides users with a predictive analytics engine that can forecast load, generation or price for each unique PI Tag measurement point. PowerRunner leverages the PI System future data to store off these created measurement tags as new time-series data sets. Additional operations on data can be configured within the PowerRunner Derived Measure Palette. PowerRunner users can operate on and across these data sets and apply simple arithmetic equations to complex logarithmic functions with if/null conditional statement to create unique equations that address specific business requirements.
Business level metadata inherent within the PowerRunner Energy Platform provides users with the ability to configure specific data usage rules that enable the PowerRunner Energy Platform to present data by read type, probability weighting, or defined proxy rules. Combined with data versioning, the business level metadata allows PowerRunner users to configure solutions that present the best available data to support operational decision management.