Open Systems International, Inc. has been selected to provide Montana-Dakota Utilities Co. with an advanced Distribution Management System based on OSI's monarch real-time smart grid platform.
MDU was created in 1924 to serve a handful of small farm communities on the border between Montana and North Dakota. Since then the company has grown into a large regional energy supplier, serving about 142,600 electric customers and 267,500 natural gas customers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.
MDU's new Advanced OSI Distribution Management System includes advanced DA SCADA functionality, as well as Geographic Information Systems Interface, Satellite and Geographic Map Interface, Automatic Vehicle and Crew Location Interface as well as Advanced Distribution Analysis functions: Distribution Power Flow, Short Circuit Analysis, and Fault Location.
"We currently use OSI technology for SCADA/EMS," said Eric Hope, Director of Communication Engineering at MDU. "Implementing an ADMS on the same platform would not only give us the advanced technology we need for our growing distribution needs but also provides many efficiencies for us in support, training, and other areas."
"MDU is a fast growing utility," said Hormoz Kazemzadeh, VP of Distribution and Smart Grid at OSI. "We are happy to be able to expand our real time Operations Technology platform at MDU and support their distribution grid modernization efforts now and in the future."
Montana-Dakota Utilities Co. distributes natural gas and generates, transmits and distributes electricity and provides related services in the northern Great Plains. Montana-Dakota is a division of MDU Resources Group, Inc. (www.mdu.com), a multidimensional natural resources enterprise traded on the New York Stock Exchange as "MDU".
