Smart Grid Dashboards Project Delivers New Visibility into Power Consumption Trends and Efficiency of Power Delivery

A Fortune 500 energy company serves 3.1 million customers in the Carolinas and Florida. The company is leading the way in the industry's Smart Grid initiative to update its decade's old electrical grid with a new digital grid. Smart Grid is a term used to describe a modernized electric transmission and distribution system -- enabled by digital technology -- that delivers detailed real-time information about energy use to customers.

The company employed a sophisticated business analytics strategy that featured a suite of business intelligence products. Dunn Solutions Group has been a long-term BI consulting partner on initiatives including: Business Intelligence reporting, end user training, installation and configuration of multiple BI solutions and administration of BI platforms.

The company reached out again for help creating a number of complex, customized dashboards incorporating production data from several new source systems. This proof of concept dashboard project would help determine technical complexities with the new digitally enabled source systems, and measure interest and value to end users, before investing in a full scale roll out.

The Dunn Solutions Team first helped to identify the desired Key Performance Indicators (KPI's). The team then created four distinct dashboards designed to deliver visibility into key management areas: an analysis of power consumption; reporting on the company's "Power Factor" metric which records the ratio of delivery efficiency; a breaker operations dashboard designed to monitor performance for selected parameters; and a NGDR (Smart Grid application term) dashboard that delivers real-time information from the meters. All dashboards feature a drill down capacity that allows for detailed information from region all the way through to specific substation.

The old system relied on nightly batch cycles to deliver meter information, which delayed reporting information by many hours; Smart Grid technology delivers on-demand, real-time data. The new dashboards convey this information via easy-to-read visualizations that combine data from multiple sources and can be drilled down into numerous reports for highly detailed information. This new visibility will allow the company to better track, manage and ultimately predict its electricity delivery.