Lighting Up the Night: A Conversation with Seattle City Light

Creating a Smart Grid Ecosystem is Michael Pesin’s expertise. Michael is the Chief Technology Advisor and Smart Grid Architect at Seattle City Light. In this interview he talks about the implementation of the company’s smart grid – the challenges, both operational and economical that arose – and how they are being mitigated. Will you walk us through the implementation of Seattle City Light’s smart-grid? How were you able to implement it as a cost-effective upgrade that could also provide the flexibility and future-proofing that would be necessary for a power system in the 21st Century? We are in the fairly early stages of the process of implementing smart-grid. We have a very good plan, we have a very good grand vision for long-term with well-defined components. But as far as implementation, we still are in fairly early stages, mostly because of lack of funding. In 2009, I believe, we applied for the Smart Grid Investment Grant from the Department Of Energy but we were not one of the recipients. But in preparation for this project, we have developed a vision for smart-grid for the long-term. And once we learned that we are not going to be getting funding, we had to change this vision, but what we had to change is the schedule. So we still have the same plan that we wanted to implement when we worked on the smart-grid investment-plan proposal, but instead of doing it in two to six months as it would be required by this grant, it may take us five to seven years to go through this whole implementation stages. So the way we defined our smart-grid strategy, we broke it in several pieces that complement each other. Then we have a substation automation program, a distribution automation program, and after that we are looking into the customer and technologies – one of them is AMI. And then we have a set of IT systems that is complementing or enabling all of these other technologies. So on the substation automation, we have full funding and we are going ahead with this as we speak. Distribution automation we have full funding, we just have not had enough resources. It’s just starting to be implemented this year. AMI, we’ve been working really hard to get city council approval and budget approval from the city council. We included this in our strategic plan, and city council has approved full funding for 2015. So this year, 2014, we will start working on a new vendor selection process and on a process we designed. In order for us to be able to get funding from DOE in 2009, we had to be what DOE called "shovel ready." And the only way for us to prepare for that was to do all of the upfront work before we knew whether we get money or don’t get any money. So in relation to AMI, we went through a whole selection process. But then we learned we have not been able to secure funding and we had to cancel the process. So we have a pretty good understanding of what we need from our AMI system, but in five years, technology changes so drastically that we would have to do this whole process again this year. That’s a good strategy. And like you said, you’ve come up against some roadblocks, but what is your long-term vision for the smart-grid? Yes, so in long-term vision, we see the smart-grid as an ecosystem, basically. It’s, the value with smart-grid and deliver is a syllogistic value that comes from multiple systems working together. So in the past, we had multiple silos, whether it was organizational silos or technology silos. With smart-grid the biggest difference is not that it’s a lot of new technologies, which is true as well, but the fact that all these silos can no longer exist on their own. They have to work together. So every single system, with almost no exception, has to be fully interoperable with another system. And interoperability should always come standard. So ideally you would have standards that could be applied across the entire smart-grid ecosystem. Unfortunately we’re not quite there yet. The industry is not mature enough to have universal standards that can be applied everywhere, so the next best thing is to enable the ability for two components to talk to each other even if they use slightly different standards. So this is the main kind of idea of our selection of our systems, to make sure that we don’t get anything that would paint us in a corner; that we don’t pick a system that either becomes obsolete in five to ten years, or will not be able to work syllogistically with other systems that we select. At the conference you’ll be joined by Mark Browning, who is the vice president of IT Comed, and Theodore Johnson, who is the IT director of enterprise asset management at Exelon in a panel discussion entitled, "Enhancing Collaboration Between OT and IT Teams." So let’s talk about some of your best practice approaches to improve collaboration between Operational Technology and Information Technology? Yes, this is an excellent question, this is the one I would love to not only talk about, but also hear what other people have to say and learn. We don’t have a solution. We are working on this. But everybody understands that this cooperation is vital for the organization for the long term going forward with marketing technologies. Historically, IT and OT have different objectives, and that was okay because they served different purposes. IT and OT had some interaction but it was siloed. So today, we have more emphasis put on data, more devices being integrated with each other and communicating with each other, and using underlying IT technologies either for communications or for data processing. You can no longer afford to have two different services for IT and OT. Now, how you merge them, or how you cooperate, that’s a great question. And I don’t think there’s a universal approach that can be used in any organization. I think you have multiple solutions, based on an historical organizational environment, and based on what are you trying to accomplish long-term and short -term. So for us, one of the projects that is fully underway is substation automation. In the past, there was a very limited communication with requirements, while for substation data; it was only going to Energy Management System, to EMS. And that was well understood, there was a clear demarcational line, here is where OT stops, this is where IT starts, and it was fairly well-defined. You only had a few people who had to call up make sure the systems worked together. Now it changes drastically, because instead of one device or two devices, we need to talk between substation IT systems. You have dozens of devices, if not hundreds of devices to each substation that, not only they all talk to each other, but they talk to more than one system. They’re not only talking to Energy Management System, they’re talking to asset management and many other systems on the same level. So in addition to that, another challenge is that in the past we’ve had what they call "security by obscurity." Now, we have IT-based communication with multiple data bands, so security becomes a paramount issue. In essence, you can not build a system and then think about how you can bolt on security later because security has to be embedded by design. And people who have a lot of responsibility in security typically reside within the IT department. So this is another important aspect of cooperation. It’s communication, it’s data and it’s security. Although there is not really a best practice approach yet established, could you provide an example of how the convergence of the two capabilities would enable smart-grid development and improved analytics? Well the first step, and it’s very simple, is for departments and organizations to start talking to each other. You’ll be surprised how adaptive these conversations can be since there’s a lot of misconceptions from both the IT and OT side. And when you get people in the same room and you start discussing the issues without trying to grab a piece of the pie, and just talking about what are the issues and how they can be solved, that’s the very first step in what can be improved in existing processes by cooperating on a specific issue and system. What further thoughts will you be discussing at the conference? Yes. One of the ideas that I’ve had for quite a few years now is, historically we have IT people or computer people, and we had communications people, or OT people. But, maybe there are three categories. Now it changed. Now you have a single box that has all three components. It has an electrical system, it has connection to voltage devices with high voltage connections, it has communication capabilities, it talks to other smart boxes and other IT systems, among other things. So what you need to have, you need to have ideally a single person or a single group of people with all three skill sets. And I started calling them smart grade technicians, I don’t know if it’s a good name or not, but it accurately denotes new job specifications for a few personnel. It points to the individual who can be knowledgeable about all three tasks. Professionals who used to come out of school knew very little about IT networking, data security or IT. But, what the industry needs is this new skill set that combines all three into one. So we’re looking for highly skilled people with an associate’s or bachelor’s degree who can go in the field and work on this equipment. And I’ve been working with local colleges to achieve this. There is a lot of interest in this on the local university and community college level. It’s the future. Michael will speak at the upcoming Data Analytics for Utilities: Asset Management event this March 24 – 26 in Chicago. He will lead the session titled "Creating Smart Grid Ecosystem to Enable Advanced Asset Management" and will take part in the panel discussion, "Enhancing Collaboration Between OT and IT Teams."

Lighting Up the Night: A Conversation with Seattle City Light

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Lighting Up the Night: A Conversation with Seattle City Light

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