Beyond the Data Utility Analytics Institute, Erin Hardick

How can a utility get a high-level view of their overall safety? The Omaha Public Power District build a Safety Index that is displayed as a dashboard and available to anyone in the organization. The Safety Index measures various indicators, each of which are scored and weighted in an overall safety score. Every month, the entire company receives an email with the safety score, which helps disseminate safety information and increase transparency. Paul Tranisi, Corporate Safety System and Data Analyst at OPPD worked with a team to build the Safety Index. He walks us through the trial and error involved in scoring safety indicators, and how they calculate an overall safety score.

El Paso Electric’s Enterprise Advanced Analytics team evolved out of a group working in power generation. It all started when they recognized an onerous process for collecting data for regulatory and compliance filings. They were dedicating a vast amount of time sifting through large datasets to find what they needed, so they decided to build an application to streamline data collection and availability. The result was the Generation Event Application Recorder (GEAR). With the success of the GEAR project, these data enthusiasts secured executive buy-in to launch the Enterprise Advanced Analytics team. Nadia Powell, Director of Enterprise Advanced Analytics, and Aaron Arzaga, Sr.Data Science and Business Intelligence Analyst, championed the GEAR project. On this episode, Nadia and Aaron share how they pulled the dashboard together and proved to their executives that analytics was worth an investment.

Tesla isn’t the only one making electric vehicles (EVs) popular; every major automaker has announced plans for EVs in the next five years. How can utilities use data and analytics to prepare for the onslaught of EV’s and create an exceptional owner experience? Andrew Higgins, senior director of technology and product innovation at CPS Energy, and Tom Mahar, data scientist at ComEd, answer this question.

The changing dynamic of energy markets means utilities want to position themselves as the go-to experts for consumers. What are utilities doing to educate customers and create their profile as “trusted energy advisor”? Jeff Yankley, director of customer analytics & insights at Consumers Energy; Tim Krall, director of customer analytics for Exelon Utilities; and Shelly Hagerman, principle energy & utilities at West Monroe share their insights.

The term digital twin has been around for years, but there are many different definitions of digital twin and it can be a very abstract concept. In this episode we take the digital twin out of the abstract and talk about real-world working examples of the digital twin. Matt Piper, Global Director of Industry Solutions at ESRI is focused on building digital twins of the social, natural, and built environments using GIS data. He talks about the importance of data quality, data governance, and how to integrate various datasets to support the digital twin.

The world’s climate is changing, or as Andy Bochman, Senior Grid Strategist, National & Homeland Security, for Idaho National Lab, likes to say we’re experiencing global weirding. Extreme weather events are occurring more frequently and with higher intensity, impacting the grid and exposing its vulnerabilities. How can utilities better prepare infrastructure for the changing climate and extreme weather events? This two part series on climate risk features Andy, and his colleague Tom Wall, Program Lead, Engineering & Applied Resilience, at Argonne National Laboratory who work with climate models to understand infrastructure resilience. In part two, Andy and Tom talk about adaptive resilience and how to make infrastructure decisions using the data discussed in part one.