OSI Wins New Smart Grid Project to Supply Advanced Volt/VAR Control System to Modesto Irrigation District

Jan. 18, 2011
January 17, 2011, Minneapolis, Minnesota -- Open Systems International, Inc. (OSI) has been awarded a new contract by Modesto Irrigation District (MID) of Modesto, California, for a new multi-phased real-time Volt/VAR Control System project. Located ...

January 17, 2011, Minneapolis, Minnesota -- Open Systems International, Inc. (OSI) has been awarded a new contract by Modesto Irrigation District (MID) of Modesto, California, for a new multi-phased real-time Volt/VAR Control System project.

Located in California's Central Valley, MID (www.mid.org) is a multi-service utility that provides electric service to more than 111,000 residential, commercial and industrial accounts; serves irrigation water to over 58,000 acres of California farmland; and supplies a daily average of about 36 million gallons of treated drinking water to the City of Modesto. MID is publicly owned, controlled by a locally elected Board of Directors and not-for-profit.

Based on the OSI Spectra™ Distribution Management System (DMS) platform, this multi-phased new Volt/VAR Control (VVC) System project will enable MID to optimize system voltage levels, reduce system losses, manage reactive power supply and implement conservation voltage reduction. The project will ultimately span 34 distribution substations and 170 distribution feeders. In a later phase, the contract may be expanded to include full Smart Grid DMS functionality.

The new Volt/VAR Control system for MID is based on OSI's monarch™ (Multi-platform Open Network ARCHitecture) platform, along with the advanced functionality presented by OSI's next-generation, .NET-based Graphical User Interface; Distribution Network Management; Geographic Information Systems Interface; Distribution Power Flow and Conservation Voltage Reduction, with an interface to Silver Spring Network's AMI system.OSI (www.osii.com) provides open, state-of-the-art and high-performance automation solutions to utilities worldwide.

These solutions include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, Network Management Systems (NMS), Energy Management Systems (EMS), Distribution Management Systems (DMS) and Generation Management Systems (GMS); as well as individual software and hardware products and Smart Grid Solutions for utility operations internationally.

OSI is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. For additional information regarding this news release please contact [email protected].

About the Author

Amy Fischbach | Field Editor

Amy Fischbach is the field editor for the Electric Utility Operations section of Transmission & Distribution World. She worked for Prism Business Media (now Penton) for eight years, most recently as the managing editor of Club Industry's Fitness Business Pro magazine. She is now working as a freelance writer and editor for B2B magazines. Amy earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. She serves as the national vice president of the American Society of Business Publication Editors. She can be reached at [email protected].

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