Category: Outage Management

Here are some more excerpts from our latest study of the World Market Study of SCADA, Energy Management Systems, Distribution Management Systems and Outage Management Systems in Electric Utilities: 2013-2015. The information below was collected from 101 electric utilities in the U.S. and Canada between the 4th quarter of 2012 and 1st quarter 2013. The survey sample consisted of Investor Owned utilities (21%), Public Power (35%), Cooperatives (44%), and Canadian Utilities (13%).

Has your utility converged SCADA/DMS and OMS functions?
A total of 35% of utility respondents either had already converged SCADA/DMS and OMS or planned to do so by the end of 2015. Only 6% of Public Power utilities surveyed had already converged these functions, but another 21% had plans in place to do this by 2015.

Has your utility converged SCADA/DMS and OMS functions? (as of Jan. 2013)

What functions have been converged/or plan to be converged?
Eighteen respondents said they had either converged SCADA and OMS, or planned to. Some mentioned that their SCADA reported all operations and statuses of monitored devices to their OMS, and some indicated that SCADA and OMS were less tightly integrated (for example, in some cases SCADA might only report switch/breaker status to OMS.) Here are a few of the more specific comments that were mentioned on the survey:

• AMI system will provide customer meters out to the OMS system on a limited basis.
• All distribution SCADA functions have been integrated with OMS/DMS through interface applications.
• SCADA reports all operations/statuses of monitored devices to OMS
• One way interface from SCADA to OMS (breaker & switch status)
• Integrated platforms – smart meter “last gasp” info feeding GIS & SCADA systems which then feeds Outage Notification system
• Topology (coloring feeder); Load Flow; Real Time Metering; Volt-VAR Control; Outage Report
• SCADA/DMS. SCADA provides the load data to operate the DMS.
• Multispeak connections between SCADA and OMS
• Predicted and actual outages
• Telvent’s ADMS product (OMS&DMS) to be installed on top of upgraded Telvent OASyS DNA SCADA system.
• Estimated restoration times, extent of outage, number of customers

Does your utility currently have real-time linkages between SCADA and GIS or OMS?
Sixty percent of utilities surveyed did not have any real-time linkages in place as of January, 2013. About one-third had real-time linkages in place between SCADA and OMS, while just 15% had real-time linkages between SCADA and GIS.

Larger Investor Owned utilities were more likely to have real-time communications linkages in these situations. Just over half of Investor Owned utilities (52%) had real-time linkages between SCADA and OMS, and 24% had real-time linkages between SCADA and GIS. Fifty-four percent of large utilities (i.e. serving more than 1 million customers) had real-time linkages between SCADA and OMS.

Does your utility currently have real-time linkages between SCADA and GIS or OMS? (as of Jan. 2013)

More details about the topics covered in this and other studies are available on our reports page.