Smart Grid
Smart grids deliver electricity from suppliers to consumers using digital technology to save energy, reduce cost and increase reliability and transparency. Such a modernized electricity network is being promoted by many governments as a way of addressing energy independence, global warming and emergency resilience issues.
Whether you are in utility management or a customer, the emergence of Smart Grid technologies and initiatives will affect you in some fashion in the very near future. Some are suggesting Smart Grid could have a more significant effect on the utility industry than Y2K had at the turn of the millennium. On October 27th, 2009 the Obama administration announced that it will be providing close to four billion dollars in matching funds to utilities. That will undoubtedly trigger a flurry of activity to get on board the Smart Grid initiative. With government showing its support through new legislation and mandating state and federal compliance, you can be assured that Smart Grid will have a profound effect on the utility industry and all of the players in the utility ecosystem.
How it will affect your utility and Enterprise Software
Government funding and tariff mandates are the compelling business drivers that will force utilities into changing their business models to accommodate Smart Grid. Utilities will have to invest heavily in new infrastructure for their delivery, supply chain, maintenance and support systems to accommodate Smart Grid. From upgrading and reengineering connection points, pipes, wires, and meters in the field to upgrading Enterprise Software, a utility’s Smart Grid initiative will undeniably be a significant undertaking.
New state of the art technology and functionality embedded in the latest Enterprise Software Systems, such as Asset Management Systems and Customer Information Systems, will be required in order to make the transformation to the new world of Smart Grid. Examples of operational areas and new requirements triggered by Smart Grid include:
- Meter Purchasing and Inventory Control
- Special bolt-on energy monitoring devices for customers to monitor their consumption usage
- Provision for alternate fuel types and rate structures
- Time of use or on/off peak billing
- New customer bills
- New meter reading and associated interfacing systems
- More flexibility in system configuration and processing of new types of field service activities
In summary, these are exciting times for energy and green conscious utility customers and for our world as a whole as we make the transition to Smart Grid. Smart Grid will provide more choices for customers, nations, and the world, to achieve financial, green, and energy independence. If you are a utility executive and are seeking cost effective high quality options to assist you with your transition to Smart Grid, contact Blue Heron Consulting.
Services
- Customer Information Systems CIS systems enable service providers to handle new billing tariffs, meter equipment, and alternate energy options. Smart grid is one of those game changing events like Y2K.
- Work and Asset Management (WAM) From Synergen to WAM, Blue Heron’s WAM practice has been proving implementation and support services since the late 1990’s.
- Smart Grid Smart grids deliver electricity from suppliers to consumers using digital technology to save energy, reduce cost and increase reliability and transparency. Such a modernized electricity network is being promoted by many governments as a way of addressing energy independence, global warming and emergency resilience issues.
- Enterprise Resource Planning Blue Heron Consulting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Practice enables organizations to leverage their investment in leading E-Business applications from Oracle and PeopleSoft.
- Managed Services: Blue Heron’s Managed Services focuses on minimizing one of the most important IT metrics – Total Cost of Ownership. With up to 70% of total application costs represented by support and maintenance of an application after it is moved to production, a proven and reliable services organization dedicated to driving cost down is paramount to ongoing business success.
- Project Health Assessments Pioneered work products are either developed from scratch or leveraged from experiences or material from non CC&B/WAM/EBS implementations and often yield unpredictable, inefficient, or flawed results.
- Training /eLearning: The key to the design and roll out of a successful training program lies in following a proven instructional systems design. The ADDIE model, one of the most widely used instructional systems design approach, is employed by Blue Heron to ensure that the training solution meets the training need.
- Data Migration Services Efficient data migration from legacy CIS environments is the single most important factor to implementation success and often represents a project’s critical path. Blue Heron’s data migration services are founded on early collaborative planning, data inspection, and iterative testing to build a solid foundation for attaining financial balancing and continuity of business operations.
- Geographic Information Systems GIS systems enable customers to integrate hardware, software, workflow and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information.
