E Source has introduced technology at scale: E Source Digital Grid Solutions. Framed by a fresh, data-driven approach and supported by research and solution services, Digital Grid Solutions help utilities solve the most pressing financial and operational challenges on their path to becoming a Sustainable Utility. The Digital Grid Solutions—Vegetation Management, Storm Insight, and Capital Optimization—provide a comprehensive decision-support capability that enables utilities to make critical operations and maintenance (O&M) and capital investment decisions based on risk and ROI.
Called risk-spend efficiency, the E Source approach assesses risk across the grid and, through advanced modeling run on a rigorous digital replica of the system, identifies actions most likely to deliver the biggest reliability and financial returns, effectively enabling utilities to ‘price’ risk across the grid to make the best investments for customers.
This capability, which moves beyond simply identifying risk to using data to optimize what to do about it, is critical in helping utilities improve how they address the most disruptive and expensive threats to their grid, from storm-related outages to the growing danger of wildfires, as well as how they invest in resiliency measures. Understanding that utilities need to manage all these competing needs contemporaneously, E Source Digital Grid Solutions enable utilities to apply data science across a host of pressing use cases through the use of modern, scalable, and secure web applications, each auto-configured to a utility’s specific needs based on their own data, accelerating speed-to-value:
Vegetation Management. The E Source Vegetation Management application ingests and harmonizes a utility’s data with over 400 high-value, third-party sources, including remotely-sensed (LiDAR, satellite), geographic, topographic, and weather data, to accurately predict where and when vegetation-induced outages will occur. E Source clients typically are able to reallocate ~ 20% of their vegetation management budget to optimize reliability and safety.
Storm Insight. The E Source Storm Insight application ingests available utility data and fuses it with high-value third-party data, including advanced weather data, to drive hourly predictions of where and when storm-induced outages will occur on the distribution system. Storm Insight increases outage-prediction accuracy by 20% three days ahead of a storm, and by 30% one day ahead, reducing crew-deployment costs by 10-20%.
Capital Optimization. The E Source Capital Optimization application leverages AI and machine learning to identify and price risk across the grid, enabling utilities to prioritize investments to maximize safety, reliability, and economic outcomes.
Radically improving any big-ticket O&M expense—vegetation management, for example, is typically an electric utility’s biggest O&M expense and top cause of outages—has historically proven costly, and often frustrating. And, while capital improvements can be easy to deploy, evaluating their effectiveness and impact both before and after implementation has proven elusive. This all changes with E Source Digital Grid Solutions—pre-built, scalable, predictive solutions that configure themselves based on a utility’s unique data, are supported by utility-domain experts, and which provide an incredible bargain, both in cost and speed-to-value, over custom-built solutions.
“At E Source, we’ve drawn on our deep utility domain and data science expertise to address one of the industry’s biggest and most pressing challenges: improving grid safety and reliability while supporting clean energy and affordable rates,” says Ted Schultz, CEO of E Source. “Our suite of Digital Grid Solutions arms utilities with a predictive decision-support tool. Using the risk-spend efficiency approach, our solutions help them make better decisions and validate those decisions for measurable value. Welcome to the new E Source, a company 100% committed to helping our utility partners become a Sustainable Utility.”
For more information about E Source Digital Grid Solutions, including use-case success stories, visit www.esource.com/public/digital-grid-solutions.
