Click here to read this blog series from the beginning.

The electric utility industry is currently undergoing the greatest period of transformation in its history. Utilities are facing new challenges, and these challenges present opportunities for them to reevaluate business processes that have remained unchanged for decades. This blog series delves into six of what we consider to be the most impactful challenges, dissects them, and hypothesizes how they will shape the future of the utility industry. This blog post explores how security requirements have evolved in recent decades and how utilities can proactively approach cybersecurity.

In early 2000, Vitek Boden, a disgruntled ex-employee of a vendor for the Maroochy Shire Council in Australia, decided to settle scores. Using his knowledge as a former insider, he managed to hack into the Maroochy Water Services SCADA system and disrupt various sewage pump stations, releasing more than one million liters of sewage into local waterways and parks. Boden’s actions caused significant environmental damage and created the potential for mass disease and illness. This incident has led to a security overhaul in the utilities industry across the globe.

From protection against large scale epidemics as described above to protections against blackouts caused by a hostile nation or entity, cybersecurity is a top priority in the utilities community today. To understand the challenges of cybersecurity, let’s take a stroll back in time. In the 1950s after the mass electrification of the United States, supplying electricity reliably across the length and breadth of the nation was of primary importance. Digitization was still years away, and smart grids more distant still. Security measures were developed primarily to protect against physical intrusion to sensitive installations like substations. Protection against rogue agents gaining entry to sensitive installations became more important as the U.S. began to harness nuclear power for energy in the ‘60s and ‘70s. This was primarily achieved through thorough background checks of all utility personnel, adherence to guidelines set by organizations such as Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and others. The personal computer revolution of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s brought with it specific challenges related to digitization and safety.

With the rise of the internet and large-scale digitization and interconnectedness in the ‘90s, cybersecurity started to become a major concern. Hackers don’t need physical presence to wreak havoc on both consumer and corporate networks. A misplaced click on an innocent-looking link could take out an entire corporate communications network for days, costing millions of dollars in losses to a corporation. Utility companies, too, must now face these challenges, as the rollout of the smart grid has brought with it hitherto unknown levels of interconnectedness between the utility, the grid, and everyday customers. As the Vitek Boden incident suggests, not only does physical access to the premises need monitoring, online access to critical and sensitive systems must be monitored as well.
So how does a utility protect itself from being “Bodened?” While new threats will continue to emerge, the answer lies in adoption of two major strategies. The first strategy is spreading awareness about security threats through education and adopting a security-conscious culture throughout the organization. The second is adopting institutional standards and enforcing those standards by only interacting with vendors who adhere to them.

Let us first talk about spreading awareness through education. Password manager Keeper compiled a list of the most commonly used passwords from the 25 million passwords leaked during data breaches in 2016. Among the top five were ‘123456,’ ‘123456789,’ ‘qwerty,’ ‘12345678,’ and ‘111111.’ In another example of breached security, an executive, disregarding his firm’s IT policy, decided to use his own router at base factory settings in the office only to realize that his emails were hacked and were being sent to a server in China. Examples such as these display a general lack of awareness about security. Through education and IT policies, corporations are moving toward a more security-focused culture. Disallowing personal external drives from being inserted into work computers, restricting access to certain websites and requests via firewall, and only allowing installations of software and hardware by recognized IT personnel are some of the changes that organizations are implementing to make themselves less vulnerable to external attack.

While education and awareness can revolutionize the security apparatus of a utility, there are institutional changes that must be made to bolster security as well. These institutional changes are determined based on standards such as the critical infrastructure protection (CIP) standard by North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). These cybersecurity standards are mandatory for compliance and help the utility industry in general to become more secure. For example, after the Boden attack, CIP standards were updated to ensure direct radio communication with SCADA is not permitted. From that point forward, communication standards such as MultiSpeak could be used to issue commands to a SCADA system to garner information about the system with proper security and a gatekeeper device. Older communication standards such as ICCP could no longer be used to communicate with SCADA systems. Vendor selection processes for member utilities also change to comply with these standards. This speeds up the adoption of security-related standards and reduces security risks to important and sensitive installations.

Evaluation of how well a utility is meeting its goals, both from a security education perspective and from an adoption of utility standards perspective, is achieved through yearly or quarterly security audits. Just like financial audits evaluate the financial health of a company, these security audits determine the health of the security infrastructure of a utility. These audits, performed by a third party, may identify loopholes that can be exploited by hackers to gain unlawful entry into sensitive systems. These also help instill a security-conscious mindset in solution architects, developers, and vendors, as the penalties of non-adherence to security standards may lead to costly changes to the solution, depleting the budget allocated to the projects they are running.

As the utility industry continues to break new ground and enter new levels of automation and digitization, security measures must continue to evolve to meet the ever-present threat of rogue entities attempting to disturb the United States’ energy and water supplies for their own nefarious purposes. A combination of both large scale institutional changes and security awareness at the individual level will be required to meet these security challenges. However, the efforts to combat security threats are worth the benefits reaped through grid modernization. With proactive solutions in place, utilities and the third-party vendors they select will be ever-ready to meet emerging security challenges.

This concludes our blog series “The Evolution of the Smart Grid.” For more information on how Red Clay can help your utility optimize operations, please visit Services or contact sales@redclay.com

About the Author

As a senior consultant for Red Clay Consulting, Ankit Malik works primarily in analysis of software functionality and client requirements, designing a complete solution, leading teams performing the configuration or custom development required to meet requirements, leading testing efforts including unit, string and migration testing, and delivery support. Ankit offers a strong background of C and C++ programming, as well as significant experience in XML, XPath and many other scripting languages. Ankit has worked with SOAP, AJAX, and is knowledgeable of web services. He is also experienced in Middleware architecture and technologies, including BPEL and Oracle SOA Suite, and has worked extensively with two-way device communications. 

Sources

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2561484/security0/utility-hack-led-to-security-overhaul.html
https://keepersecurity.com/blog/2017/01/13/most-common-passwords-of-2016-research-study/

Click here to read this blog series from the beginning.

The electric utility industry is currently undergoing the greatest period of transformation in its history. Utilities are facing new challenges, and these challenges present opportunities for them to reevaluate business processes that have remained unchanged for decades. This blog series delves into six of what we consider to be the most impactful challenges, dissects them, and hypothesizes how they will shape the future of the utility industry. This blog post explores the types of partnerships utilities form with third party vendors. 

In a previous post in this series, we talked about demand response (DR) programs and how DR providers can bid capacity reserves into the wholesale market. What we did not mention is that these DR providers could be utilizing energy storage systems, and a pilot project in the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) energy market did just that. In 2015, Stem Inc, a provider of distributed storage system solutions, successfully bid aggregated storage from multiple customers as a demand response resource into the wholesale market, a first for the state of California. This feat was the result of a partnership between a utility within CAISO jurisdiction, Stem Inc, and Olivine – the company behind the software that handled the bidding transaction. During times of peak load, the energy storage facilities of many different customers act together to discharge electricity, and during periods of over-generation, the excess electricity can be distributed to each storage system. The utility benefits from the large-scale flexible load, and Stem’s customers benefits from the additional revenue of providing their storage systems as demand response resources.

This story is just one example of a utility partnering with third-party vendors to provide value to the customer. Partnerships can be as simple as power purchase agreements (PPA), in which a utility signs a contract to purchase power from a third-party generator, or as complex as multi-year implementations of smart grid equipment and software. These partnerships can emerge as a result of necessary upgrades to aging infrastructure, grants from governments or organizations for pilot projects, or as a response to customer influence. Utilities can no longer afford to have a one-size-fits-all mentality towards their offered services, but many of their legacy systems were not designed for this shift.

Red Clay works with many utilities that have homegrown legacy systems. They internally developed these systems decades ago when rate offerings and billing processes were simpler and universal. Over the years, the legacy base functionality had to undergo countless customizations to keep up with new rates and customer programs, and each iteration has unintended consequences, which often results in work-around fixes. For instance, a legacy billing system might be built on the assumption that a rate schedule only has two seasons, summer and winter. The utility’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) requires them to implement a new rate with a new season, spring. The utility must make the decision to either do the calculations outside of their customer information system (CIS) and import the results to produce the bills, or find a workaround that “tricks” the system into calculating three seasons. Whether they choose Solution A or Solution B, either will have many downstream effects and considerations, because the CIS is the center of the utility’s operations. For a utility, this example is one decision out of many that they face, and all these new requirements layer on top of a base functionality to produce a system that is hardly recognizable. Furthermore, the employees who coded these systems are nearing retirement age, and new employees face steep learning curves and dependence on experienced employees to become competent with a system that has undergone so many changes that it is hard to tell where one patch fix ends and another begins.

For many utilities faced with aging information and management systems, retiring the legacy system becomes an opportunity to upgrade to third-party software solutions that can provide the functionality their changing business model requires. Opening the upgrade to a vendor vetting process gives the utilities more solution options and ensures solutions will be competitively priced. Vendors expose the utilities to best practices learned from many implementations and to knowledge sharing from vendor specializations and expertise that are difficult for utilities to capture in-house. Each topic we have focused on in past blog posts and will cover in future posts have benefited from companies that specialize in them. To help utilities find reliable vendors, Green Mountain Power has compiled a database of vendors in nine markets (many of which we touch on in our blog series): AMI, Communications, Demand-Side management, Distribution Automation, Energy Storage, Electric Vehicle integration, Micro-grids, Network Operations, and Soft Grid efforts.

These nine industries are sometimes referred to as the “grid edge,” the increasingly elusive boundary between customer and utility. Vendors can connect utilities to behind-the-meter services to aid utilities in not only forecasting energy use, but also in exploring potential service offerings for their customers. To adapt to the future, utilities must focus their attention on their endpoints and away from a centralized mentality. Third-party vendors are helping them do this by providing everything from data analytics and the sensors to provide the data to automatic controls and the management software to deploy them. For instance, just within the demand response realm, many types of third party vendors exist. Nest produces a smart thermostat that can be controlled from a smartphone, which allows residential customers to respond remotely to price signals or calls for power reduction from the utility. EnerNoc installs control equipment that enables demand response at customer sites, while also acts as a demand response provider by aggregating customer demand response reserves, managing curtailments, and bidding capacity reserves into the wholesale markets. AutoGrid is a data analytics software company that can help utilities identify demand response potential and implement a demand response management system – even connecting to the customer’s own devices and control equipment. Each of these companies has helped utilities navigate through new demand response initiatives to establish robust programs beneficial to everyone involved.

When a utility faces uncertainty about a new revenue stream or how to integrate new service offerings into their current business model, they often reach out to companies already making headway in the industry. When Utility Dive asked 500 electric utility executives what they believe their business model should be for distributed energy resources (DER), 60% of respondents thought partnering with third-party vendors to deploy DERs was the preferred approach. This statistic aligns with what we see in the industry. Most DER systems, like rooftop solar panels, have been installed by vendors, who provide finance options to the customer. Furthermore, partnering with third-party vendors can be a way for utilities to avoid any uncertainty due to regulatory restrictions on rate-based investments. Instead of providing utility-owned rooftop solar to customers, a utility could partner with a company like SolarCity to provide community solar. The community benefits from the shared output of the panels, enabling many customers who cannot afford the upfront investment of solar or do not have a suitable location for panels to participate, and the utility benefits from having more control over the location and operation of the solar panels.

Some vendors have even gone as far as offering smart-grid-as-a-service packages, that allows utilities to bypass large upfront costs associated with implementing an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) program. The third-party vendor could implement and host the software, or even host and operate the network. In line with this thinking, other vendors propose infrastructure-as-a-service, a method of deferring the construction of new power plants by partnering with third-party DER providers. The DER provider agrees to provide enough electricity to offset the need for a new power plant at a significantly cheaper cost than it would take to build the plant. Regulations would need to be in place to ensure the contract stipulates a similar return on investment that the stakeholders would receive from traditional infrastructure investments. Both concepts challenge utilities to reimagine their business models. Third-party vendors are helping utilities get to the edge of innovation and explore the idea of becoming distribution system operators.

For more information on how Red Clay can help your utility optimize operations in coalition with third party vendors, visit Services or contact sales@redclay.com

Click here to read the next blog post in this series. 

About the Author

As a consultant at Red Clay Consulting, Megan Milam has comprehensive training and functional experience with Oracle Utilities Application Framework software and Oracle Utilities Lodestar software.  Furthermore, her Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering, with an emphasis in power systems and smart grid technology, and her previous work experience at a transmission System Operator give her a technical background with a firm understanding of industry best practices and an ability to implement optimal solutions.

Sources

https://www.utilitydive.com/library/state-of-the-electric-utility-2016/

The electric utility industry is currently undergoing the greatest period of transformation in its history. Utilities are facing new challenges, and these challenges present opportunities for them to reevaluate business processes that have remained unchanged for decades. This blog series delves into six of the most prominent challenges, dissects them, and hypothesizes how they will shape the future of the utility industry. To better understand how the utility industry is changing, we would like to spend this introductory blog post contrasting the past and the future, while introducing each of these six challenges.

Let us introduce you to a typical utility in the 1950s. We’ll call it Ameritown Electric Company. Business is great in 1950. Each year, Ameritown makes significant strides in generating electricity more efficiently each year, and as a result, it lowers the cost of kilowatt-hours for its customers each year. Furthermore, Ameritown’s customer base, especially the residential sector, is growing so fast that it can barely keep up with demand. If we had to sum up Ameritown’s business model and the electric grid in general, the phrase would be “centralized power plants.” In 1950, the grid was made up of large power plants located many miles away from the majority of utility customers. Ameritown and other utilities of 1950 were able to amass the funds needed to build these power plants and extensive power lines because of the yearly growth in their customer base and their significant energy efficiency gains.

Fast forward 100 years, and the Ameritown Electric Company of 2050 has a completely different business model. Its customer base has stabilized, the fossil fuel industry is no longer making huge strides in innovation, and customers and regulators have become more concerned about environmental impacts. To keep up with these new challenges, Ameritown has had to innovate its business model with new technology and modernized business processes.

By 2050, the smart grid movement, or the modernization of the electric grid via information and communication technology, is reaching maturity. Utilities like Ameritown can monitor and understand the condition of their grid like never before. Decisions can be carried out in an instant through automation and remote control. Power quality and reliability are better than ever, thanks to sensors throughout the grid. The grid is more resilient due to its ability to instantly identify outages and reroute electricity. These advancements all significantly changed the way utilities operate and respond to problems, but one object had more transformational impact to the grid than any other technology: smart meters.

Just as centralized power plants were the foundation of the 1950s grid, smart meters and ancillary technologies now provide the backbone of the electric grid and all the services it provides. Their installation enables utilities to collect usage in small intervals as opposed to lump sums once a month and to communicate to and receive communications from the meters in real-time.

The most remarkable concept that smart meters helped Ameritown realize and establish is the partnership between the utility and its customers. In 1950, Ameritown customers knew almost nothing about their energy usage, except that someone would come to their property to read their meter every month, and they would get a bill mailed to them with a flat fee per kWh. Customers in 2050 now receive communication from the utility in a variety of ways. Their bills have changed. Some customers get bills emailed to them, or they view their bills online. Others are on pre-paid agreements, where they pay the same amount every month. Furthermore, the utility is no longer communicating to the customer only once per month. Some customers receive daily reports on the price of electricity. Others use apps on their smart phones to monitor their energy usage.

These tools and a variety of service agreements are necessary for customers in 2050, because they are no longer just consumers of electricity. Ameritown customers have distributed generation resources installed on their property. Residential customers might have solar panels on their roofs and electric vehicles or battery storage in their garages. Commercial or industrial customers might have invested in solar or wind farms and own private fuel cells or backup generators. Not only do these sources provide energy for their owners, the excess electricity that the owners cannot use is transferred to Ameritown’s grid and is used by other Ameritown customers. As a result, Ameritown pays its customers for their excess generation.

Now that customers in 2050 are also producers of electricity, the grid can no longer be described as a system of large, centralized power stations. The grid is decentralized, meaning it consists of many smaller generation units dispersed throughout its jurisdiction.  Even though the architecture of the grid has changed, 2050 Ameritown stills faces issues with operating near capacity. In 1950, there were periods of the day when the grid was operating at peak capacity, mostly when the entire family came home from work and school and started to turn on appliances. Ameritown’s solution was to build more power plants. 2050 Ameritown still has periods of the day with peak usage, but the solution has changed. Instead of building more generation sites when only incremental increases are needed, Ameritown has a supplemental solution called demand response. Its customers willingly sign up to be alerted during periods of heavy load, and when they receive those alerts, they will reduce their usage. In return, the utility reimburses them for their flexibility.

Demand response is not the only customer-centric program offered by Ameritown Electric Company in 2050. It has electric vehicle charging stations installed around the city of Ameritown, which allows customers to charge their vehicles while running errands. The customers then pay for the electricity on their monthly service bill. Ameritown also provides lease agreements to customers who cannot afford or choose not to own solar panels. For a small monthly fee, customers get utility-owned solar panels installed on their roofs, and they do not have to worry about maintenance and operation of the solar systems. This sampling of programs is diverse and complex. When implementing these programs, Ameritown did not have the in-house expertise needed to install these systems, nor do they have the resources to operate all these components on a daily basis. Therefore, Ameritown partnered with third-party vendors to make these programs a reality. One vendor owns and maintains the electric vehicle charging stations, another installs solar panels for the utility, and a third operates a control center focused on forecasting periods of high use and alerting demand response customers to reduce their usage.

To interface with myriad vendors and software applications that Ameritown now requires in an efficient and cost-effective way, it utilizes communication standards such as MultiSpeak and Common Information Model (CIM). These standards are necessary since the number of software applications, and therefore, the number of interfaces has increased manyfold in the last 100 years. From a governance and cost perspective, it is simply unfeasible to have multiple interfaces, each with its own format. Hence, Ameritown worked with several other utilities a few decades ago to determine standards with which several software applications are compliant. This helps in building robust and product-independent integrations, as opposed to point-to-point integrations that change from vendor to vendor.

With high amounts of automation, inter-communication, and digitization, Ameritown now must account for a unique set of challenges that it did not have some 100 years ago. These challenges are related to that of information security and protecting customers from data theft, fraud, and potential terror attacks. Ameritown has had to invest in ensuring all its software systems can pass security audits and meet information security standards set by local councils and organizations such as NERC. Furthermore, Ameritown has trained its staff to reduce data breaches and notice security vulnerabilities and breaches.

As a whole, 2050 Ameritown Electric Company is a much more diverse utility than 1950 Ameritown. In 1950, its business model focused on reliably and safely delivering electricity from large power plants across many miles of transmission and distribution lines to its customers. In 2050, Ameritown is still focused on delivering electricity safely and reliably, but it is receiving electricity from many different sources, and its customers have become active contributors. Ameritown provides them with a multitude of information about their energy usage and customizable service agreements to fit their needs. Customers are now willing to actively control their energy usage for incentives. This expansion of service offerings is made possible through Ameritown’s partnerships with vendors, and it is able to safely and reliably provide these services through its investment in communication standards and security.

So how does a utility like Ameritown successfully adapt to thrive in an increasingly digital world, with very different customer and regulatory requirements than those that existed for the first hundred years of the grid’s existence? Please follow our blog over the next six weeks as we explore how the most prominent challenges electric utilities face today present opportunities to improve business processes and operations.

For more information on how Red Clay can help your utility optimize operations, please visit Services or contact sales@redclay.com

Click here to read the next blog post in this series.

About the Authors

As a senior consultant for Red Clay Consulting, Ankit Malik works primarily in analysis of software functionality and client requirements, designing a complete solution, leading teams performing the configuration or custom development required to meet requirements, leading testing efforts including unit, string and migration testing, and delivery support. Ankit offers a strong background of C and C++ programming, as well as significant experience in XML, XPath and many other scripting languages. Ankit has worked with SOAP, AJAX, and is knowledgeable of web services. He is also experienced in Middleware architecture and technologies, including BPEL and Oracle SOA Suite, and has worked extensively with two-way device communications. 

As a consultant at Red Clay Consulting, Megan Milam has comprehensive training and functional experience with Oracle Utilities Application Framework software and Oracle Utilities Lodestar software.  Furthermore, her Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering, with an emphasis in power systems and smart grid technology, and her previous work experience at a transmission System Operator give her a technical background with a firm understanding of industry best practices and an ability to implement optimal solutions. 

With an increasing number of utilities rolling out smart meter initiatives, keeping electricity safe, reliable, and affordable is critical. The first step towards building a smarter grid involves implementing a technology platform that can allow two-way communication between IT applications and physical smart meters. Smart meters and various IT applications must communicate information to one another regarding outages, electric usage data, device connect status, and smart meter events. The scope of such integrations continues to grow as the footprint of smart meters and enterprise applications expands in utilities.

To enable SGG integrations, there are prebuilt integration services and adapters delivered by major software vendors in the utility space, such as Oracle. Using Oracle Utilities Smart Grid Gateway (SGG) adapters, utilities now integrate multiple advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) systems that may use different technologies, protocols, and data formats to share meter data with heterogeneous enterprise applications. Smart Grid Gateway adapters effectively decouple downstream applications from advanced metering infrastructure, enabling adoption of easy-to-adapt emerging technologies. SGG abstracts business processes from specific implementation details and acts as a data communication bridge in the overall enterprise landscape, providing flexibility and extensibility throughout the lifecycle of a smart meter implementation.

Utilities host hundreds of enterprise applications to run day-to-day business processes, such as Oracle Utilities Customer Care & Billing, Meter Data Management, Operational Device Management, Network Management System, and many more. SGG integrations support various business processes. For example:

1. To bill the customers, utilities need electricity usage data. SGG feeds meter readings into the Meter Data Management (MDM) system and downstream billing system.
2. If a customer moves to a new address, SGG enables utilities to connect or disconnect smart meters remotely, alleviating the need to send a crew to the customer’s premises.
3. SGG integrations help utilities keep data in sync across their applications and head-end systems.
4. SGG reports critical outage and restoration events from network management systems to utility applications in real time.
5. SGG provides a foundation and implementation patterns to utilities to build custom integrations for various business processes.

SGG adapters handle large volumes of data from an ever-increasing list of smart devices. Utilities are now providing sophisticated user interaction to customers to track their electricity usage behavior. Now, customers can track near-real-time usage data. In the background, SGG integration services bring over interval (monthly, daily, etc.) electricity usage data from the head-end system and feed this interval data into utility applications. The head-end system provides usage data in various formats such as comma separated values (CSV) format, binary format, XML messages, etc. SGG integration services use various parsing mechanisms to parse large volumes of incoming data into individual usage readings before sending to downstream applications such as the MDM system. Utilities are also using SGG integrations to bring over weather data such as temperature, humidity, wind and precipitation to overlay with electricity usage, giving customers complete insight into their usage behavior per weather trends.

SGG adapters and integration services play a very important role in providing visibility across the electric grid. There are prebuilt SGG integrations between a utility’s network management system and enterprise applications to assist with outage detection, outage verification, and outage restoration. When Oracle Utilities Network Management System (NMS) processes trouble calls from customers, NMS issues meter ping commands to the head-end system via SGG integrations to capture meter status information. In cases of severe thunderstorms, NMS sends meter ping requests in batches to the head-end system via SGG integrations to ensure there is no power outage in a particular service territory. In cases where a power outage is detected, once the outage is restored, NMS uses Smart Grid Gateway integrations to reach the head-end system to ensure smart meters are restored by sending power restoration real-time events. The SGG platform also provides integrations and adapters for non-AMI systems to process scalar usage data to downstream billing applications for traditional manual meters.

Customer information is captured in a utility’s customer information system, which needs to be synced to downstream applications. Smart Grid Gateway integrations and adapters help utilities sync customer information across enterprise applications and systems such as Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management, Network Management System, etc. Similarly, utilities use prebuilt integrations to sync meter information and service point details and install event messages across multiple applications.

Smart Grid Gateway provides Advanced Development Kit (ADK) tools and resources to build custom integrations for utilities. Utilities may not have prebuilt integrations for all business processes or specific requirements, in which case they can leverage message patterns and foundation objects, development resources provided by SGG ADK tools to build a specific integration. Enterprise application vendors like Oracle provide both prebuilt integrations and adapter development kits to develop custom integrations.

Utility software vendors provide a wide range of integration services to meet requirements for day-to-day business processes. Smart Grid Gateway integrations help utilities reduce time, costs, and resources needed to implement business processes throughout their smart meter initiative efforts, and expedite time to market. Some of the major integrations I’ve seen and worked on most frequently include:

• SGG integrations to load scalar and interval electricity usage data: Oracle provides prebuilt integrations such as SGG-D3-USAGE and SGG-D5-USAGE adapters to load usage data from the head-end system to the Meter Data Management application. In this case, D3 stands for Landis + Gyr and D5 stands for Itron MV90 head-end systems.
• SGG integrations to load near-real-time AMI events: Oracle provides prebuilt integrations such as AMI Event Subscriber and SGG-D3-CIM-EVENT adapters to process advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) events in real time such as power outage/restoration, low voltage, tamper/diversion, etc.
• SGG integrations to support Oracle Utilities Network Management System tasks: Oracle provides prebuilt integrations such as NMS-SGG adapters to process power status updates and meter pings in real time to detect and verify power outage and restoration for a particular service territory or premises.
• SGG integration to carry out smart meter commands: Oracle provides device communication commands such as Connect Disconnect, Commission Decommission, Demand Reset, On Demand Read, and Status Check for real-time communication between enterprise applications and head-end systems (Landis + Gyr, Itron, Sensus, Elster).
• SGG integrations to sync data across applications: Oracle delivers integrations such as ODM-MDM and CC&B-MDM prebuilt integrations to sync meter information and service points and install event attributes and customer information across applications, namely Meter Data Management (MDM), Operational Device Management (ODM), and Customer Care and Billing System (CC&B).

Smart Grid Gateway (SGG) integrations help utilities streamline smart meter initiatives in a more effective way. This includes reducing costs and complexity of data stream and business processes by introducing seamless integrations across enterprise applications, head-end systems, and smart devices. Red Clay Consulting has over fifteen years of experience implementing and building Smart Grid Gateway integrations and adapters for utilities across the globe. Learn more about our System Integration & Implementation Services.

About the Author:

As a Senior Consultant at Red Clay Consulting, Veeresh Hawalkhod is responsible for developing and configuring integration solutions tailored to clients’ varying needs for usage, event data upload, and device communication commands. Veeresh brings over nine years of experience in the integration space, mainly focusing on Oracle middleware products. As a subject matter expert in Oracle Fusion Middleware, he has experience designing, developing, and deploying custom integrations for enterprise distributed applications.