Volume I - Survey of Substation Planning Officials in North America

Volume II - Substation Automation Programs: Case Studies from Eleven Major Utilities

Volume III - Substation Equipment, Intelligent Electronics Devices, and Communications Products and Services: Supplier Profiles

Volume IV - Survey of International Utility Substation Planning Officials

Volume V - World Outlook for Electric Utilities and Substation Automation: Market Forecast and Assessment

Volume V contains detailed substation equipment and instrumentation spending forecasts. Forecasts are provided for each major world region.
Also in Volume V are the overall tabulations of the responses from 78 North American and 59 international utilities, representing 39 countries.

Statistical compilation in the report consists of summary tables and cross-tabulations based on geographic location of respondents.

The following are some key findings from Volume V of this study.

On a worldwide basis, the most popular protocols currently in use include DNP 3.0-serial (32 percent) and Modbus Plus (25 percent). On a summary basis for North American utilities, both DNP LAN (24 percent) and UCA2/MMS (22 percent) led the way in mentions for planned use. Plans by international utilities to use (or change) protocols in substation automation programs centered on DNP 3.0 LN (15 percent) and also IEC 870-5 (13 percent).

Respondents were asked to rank the importance of "potential obstacles" to implementing substation automation for new substations. None of the nine listed potential obstacles on the survey were viewed as particularly difficult to overcome. While there are some substantive differences between the North American and international groups of respondents, on a summary basis, lack of standard protocols, lack of perceived benefits, and lack of economic justification were the key potential obstacles.

Currently, almost one-half (49 percent) of the utility officials responding to this study indicated that substations only communicate with EMS and SCADA systems. An additional 35 percent mentioned feeder IEDs, followed by protection engineering groups (27 percent) and load management or demand side management systems (20 percent). In terms of future plans, the most important new addition is likely to be the inclusion of trouble call management systems to communicate with substation equipment, as was indicated by 35 percent of those citing plans to add links.

Another interesting topic concerned the importance of certain measurements used to determine power quality at the substation level. Included in the list were: harmonic power flow, total harmonics, odd harmonics, even harmonics, min/max volts, system frequency, percent THD on current and on voltage, voltage transients, flicker, and voltage sags and swells.

A total of 116 utility officials responded to this question. On a global basis, respondents specified that voltages sags and swells was the most important measurement of power quality at the substation level, mentioned by 68 percent. This was followed closely by min/max volts (66 percent) and voltage transients (61 percent). See Figure 1.

Key measurements for the overall group of 69 North American respondents included sags and swells (77 percent), voltage transients (67 percent), and min/max volts (59 percent). Co-ops added flicker (61 percent).

Key measurements for the overall group of 47 international utilities included min/max volts (77 percent), system frequency (68 percent), along with voltage sags and swells (55 percent), and voltage transients (53 percent). European officials were particularly strong users of min/max voltage measurements, as were utilities in the African and Middle Eastern regions.

For additional information and pricing on this new series of reports, please call Newton-Evans at 1-800-222-2856 (internationally, 1-410-465-7316) or visit our website at www.newton-evans.com.

Chuck Newton is Scheduled Speaker at DistribuTECH: EUROPE 2000

DistribuTECH's DA/DSM Europe 2000 Conference will be held from October 10 -12 in Vienna, Austria. Chuck Newton will speak on "Substation Automation and Integration Programs: World Outlook for 2000 - 2004." Copies of Chuck Newton's speech are available upon request.

Upcoming Newton-Evans Research Report Series

Since 1978, 30 public studies of utility-related control systems, as well as more than 150 commissioned utility industry product and market studies, have been completed by Newton-Evans Research. During the remainder of 2000 and into year 2001, our research firm will be conducting three new multiclient studies in the utility sphere.

In fourth quarter 2000, we will be conducting a worldwide study of EMS/SCADA usage and trends in electric utilities. This will be Newton-Evans third series of worldwide reports in this area undertaken since 1996.

Another area of focus in the final months of 2000 concerns the world's market for ISO and automated power exchange systems.

Information technology trends in electric, gas and water utilities will be the main focal point for a report series beginning in first quarter 2001.

Cinergy's Business Process Transformation

In late 1999, Dale Justis, retired general manager of customer operations at Cinergy and an active participant on the Edison Electric Institute's Customer Operations workforce, spoke with Chuck Newton and Rick Bush, chief editor of T&D World, during the Partnering Conference held by Transmission & Distribution World magazine. Mr. Justis was a leading figure in shaping the transformation of Cinergy's customer-impinging activities in this era of profound change affecting the electric power delivery industry. This change has affected Cinergy as much as any single company in the industry.

Unlike some investor-owned utilities, Cinergy had done its re-engineering first, and only thereafter did it attempt to apply technology to the reconfigured, scaled-down utility organization. According to Dale, the biggest and most significant technology change within the company has taken place within the operations side of the business. In Dale's words, the corporate change was profound and permanent. "We went from an engineering centered business to a customer focused organization in a matter of months. The pace of change required the project development team to interact closely with internal people (users). The impact this change in systems development efforts has had on our customers is enormous. There is much more consistency in service provision and in customer responses today than ever before at Cinergy, as a direct result of the work effort which necessarily included cutting across several operating utilities."

"When the company was formed there were three distinct business processes for the traditional utilities that had been merged. There were over 90 systems just in Energy Delivery to deal with, and everything, the people, the process and the technology needed to be changed. We had to become a single corporation, we needed to improve productivity with a streamlined design process, deploy enabling technology rapidly and set a foundation for the evolving competitive environment."

Technology change occurred from top to bottom within the utility enterprise. Cinergy began to work hand-in-hand with Convergent Group to re-engineer the IT efforts within the company. This partnership has been successful for the company. Some of the benefits of this partnership include operations department successes. Re-engineering efforts involved the development of technical and operating standards for use by all utilities merged into Cinergy. Design and procurement standards were put in place as well. In the operations area, live line work is dispatched via on-board computer today. Workers can be dispatched from home. Field work orders are processed remotely, via computer - from issuance through to completion. One key issue for the partnership is the need to accommodate ongoing change within the operating companies.

"In order for the partnering effort to make a difference in day-to-day job performance, we need to maintain a close relationship with the various line organizations. The importance of single source data has spread, where the field engineer is the initiator of an order, performs updates and posts job status directly, eliminating the need for manual work order closing. It is only within the last ….36 months that IT has matured to the point that it can effectively support these field processes." Dale iterated that a third-party integrator equipped with a 'service' shop attitude and capability is the way to approach these difficult IT transitions.

Putting the various software pieces together is the easy part of the job. Managing change with the workforce is the more difficult part of implementing technology advances in the form of these super systems. "Unifying a company's workforce, pulling people into the effort who then form multidepartment interdependent team is the objective. Making the people part of the solution - pre-selling the change…helping people become empowered to see a bigger role in their own job. This is especially critical in an organization undergoing re-engineering and trying to do more with fewer human resources."

As Dale indicated, "You have to acknowledge that the individual job is actually becoming more complicated - a job that is not resolved with simple keystrokes or with button pushing. Workers are becoming the process owner here….the remaining job functions are absolutely becoming more critical."

The Role of the Internet and Extensible Systems at Cinergy

Mr. Justis insisted that the future of web-based systems is here today. "Web-enabled systems will allow our end use customers to order and to discontinue various services offered by the company. New technology tools are available to help the company transform to an e-utility and cited the need to exploit information to the advantage of the company and its customers." Dale indicated that the web-based technology - in an Intranet form - is now being used to provide internal operating units with real time information on just about any aspect of operating conditions, especially vital for outage management. At the same time, the Internet is becoming the key vehicle to keep customers informed about the company and about customer operations.

According to Dale, extensibility (a term used in the interview) means that the ability to duplicate the approach to work flow at Cinergy could be readily adopted on a global basis, not just a national basis, should the company acquire an international utility at some point. The current system is flexible enough to permit another round of process re-engineering.

Customer Information Systems at Cinergy
Currently implemented CIS can be resurrected instead of pouring millions of dollars and thousands of person-hours into new system efforts. This is an especially important concern in today's environment, when future requirements are still uncertain. In the future, Dale sees increased use of web-enabled services coming to the forefront for the CIS area.

The downside of all this progress in the CIS arena, is the inability to any longer share very much of what one company does with another industry supplier - all because of increasingly open competition in the industry. Dale indicated that there will continue to be communications among utilities regarding their CIS efforts, but that these will become 'guarded' and information sharing among utilities will be a lot less in the future, than was historically the case.

One-Half of Survey Respondents Indicate Current Use of Automated Approach to Distribution System Management

Recently, Newton-Evans completed a proprietary study on distribution system management, monitoring and control among 25 of the top 100 U.S. electric utilities. Operations and engineering officials were interviewed in this information-gathering project.

Fifty percent of those responding indicated that their utility was currently using an automated approach to distribution system management. Of these, one-third indicated use of home-grown approaches and the other two-third noted that their utility have purchased packages. Twenty-one percent indicated there were plans to use such an automated approach, and the remaining 29 percent noted no plans in the near future. Refer to Figure 2.

The utility officials were also asked what types of distribution system management information would they want to have available in an automated manner at substation, feeder and customer premise levels.

Four specific types of information were listed on the survey, with space provided to indicate any other type. The four listed were: metering, power quality (outages, sags, swells, harmonics), waveform capture, and equipment maintenance status.

Substation level - metering and power quality information led in mentions among the types of information listed. Equipment maintenance status and waveform capture were also fairly popular at the substation level.

Feeder level - One-half of the group wanted to have metering data, and equipment maintenance status information. About one-third wanted power quality information, but only 18 percent thought that waveform capture would be useful.

Customer premises level - nearly two-thirds of respondents indicated that metering data was vital, while over one-half concurred that having power quality data at the customer premises was important. One-third mentioned waveform capture, and nearly one-quarter cited equipment maintenance.

Protective Relays - North American and European Usage Patterns

One of the first Automation Perspective columns that Chuck Newton wrote for Transmission & Distribution World magazine discussed the changing usage patterns for protective relays, based on Newton-Evans' then current study of utility protection and control staffs. Now, four years later, Chuck is Automation Editor and once again talks about the relay marketplace and products.

As in the 1995 column, the pace of technology change has continued unabated through mid 2000. While numerical or digital relays continue to make inroads in every application area within the electric utilities of the world, and every week seems to bring the announcement of a new digital relay product, the use of electro-mechanical (e-m) relays is still extensive, and the purchase of new electro-mechanical relays continues to account for significant levels of unit purchases, and for 25 percent - 30 percent of dollar values.

In the most recent Newton-Evans' series of global protective relay usage studies, there are a number of interesting findings to report. Some of these topics are purchase plans, budget ranges, relay budget allocations, continuing purchases of electro-mechanical relays, and the need for outside resources to assist in protective relaying activities.

Relay Purchase Plans:
Surprisingly, similar average numbers of relays are planned for purchase for new and retrofit applications by North American and European utilities. This extends to many major types of relays, except units designed for distribution feeders. In this latter category, Western European utilities have plans to purchase about twice as many units per utility as do their North American counterparts.

Relay Budgets:
In the U.S., 18 percent of responding utilities indicated budget levels of at least $500,000. This compares with only five percent of Canadian utilities and three percent of Eastern European utilities. However, 50 percent of the Western European utilities plan to spend at least this much for relays.

Relay Budget Allocations:
Not all the budget set aside for relays is spent on relay hardware procurement. In North America and in Western Europe, less than one-half of the relay budget is to be spent on hardware, compared with a 68 percent level in Eastern Europe, including Russia and the CIS. Training accounts for about six to seven percent of the overall budget in Western Europe and in North America.

While installation costs take up only eight percent of Eastern European budget, they account for a much higher 26 percent in North America and 21 percent in Western Europe. Engineering services account for eight percent of the Eastern European budget, and about 13-14 percent for both North America and Western Europe. Other budgeted line items account for the remainder of the relay budget, according to the more than 140 utilities that took part in this survey. These "other" items can amount to quite an investment, and as mentioned by some utilities, include site testing, drafting of schemes, and panel fabrication costs. See Table 1.

Digital Relays …..Continuing to Increase Share of Total Relay Installations:
Digital relays continue to account for a high percentage of all new relay purchases, but by no means are electro-mechanical relays being cast aside. In North America, electro-mechanical relays continue to account for 22 percent to 46 percent of new use purchases, depending upon application, while Eastern European utilities are continuing to buy e-m relays almost exclusively. These utilities are trying to upgrade older e-m installations with some (15 percent to 32 percent) digital units.

Growing Need for Outside Services Providers:
In North America, the most apparent needs for outside services are in the areas of training, cited by 34 percent, and installation services (26 percent). Western European utilities agreed - at higher percentages - with the need for training and installation, but also were looking for help with commissioning (44 percent) and renovation and upgrade services (39 percent). Eastern European utilities expressed nearly universal needs for relay setting studies and training services (78 percent mentioned both), closely followed by protective system design services (73 percent). See Table 2.

Table 1: Relay Budget Allocation Comparison

   
 Table 2: Requirements for External Sources of Relay Services

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For pricing and additional information on this new series of reports, please call Newton-Evans Research at 1-800-222-2856 (or internationally, 1-410-465-7316) or visit us on our website at www.newton-evans.com.