US power leader Dominion Energy gathers and shares data from across its North American grid network using CONNECT and AVEVA™ PI System™. Dominion’s customers can view the company’s energy source and performance data to track its progress on sustainability commitments. This visibility enables Dominion’s customers to provide proof of their own net-zero commitments to investors and auditors. As a result, Dominion is increasing its profitability and helping to accelerate the low-carbon energy transition in North America.
Challenges
Dominion’s SCADA historian was growing in size and complexity
Thousands of new assets come online or get retired weekly
Disparate business functions led to inconsistent and difficult-to-access data
Results
data shared in real time and integrated into Dominion’s activities
50%
increase in speed-to-market for vital environmental data
42
potential equipment failures identified and prevented in just one year
improved reliability and efficiency of power plant operations
Spurring innovation and ensuring compliance
For decades, Dominion had generally understood itself as comprised of three distinct segments: generation, transmission, and distribution. Alongside these three, largely siloed segments, the company had traditionally viewed shared services, like the IT department and the finance and purchasing groups, as independent support organizations, which introduced further division into an already fragmented information environment.
Today, an evolving service landscape is placing new pressures on these divisions. More renewable energies are entering (and complicating) the energy mixture. Year after year, the load on Dominion’s system continues to grow, and, as a result, Dominion’s SCADA historian had grown increasingly large and complex.
“Frankly, our problems don’t care about these divisions,” says Jaime De La Ree, Supervisor of Engineering Analytics & Modeling at Dominion. “As the complexity of the problem grows, we can’t continue to operate with the assumption that these are separate parts of the business,” says De La Ree.
But shifting away from longstanding operating models isn’t so simple when you’re working in a highly regulated industry. “When you serve power to the Department of Defense and the Pentagon,” De La Ree says, “well, things get a little more complex.” The challenge Dominion faced was not just the need to innovate quickly, but to innovate quickly while remaining compliant with stringent regulations.
“In an industry that avoids risk and change in the name of reliability, we had to take steps to build an environment that challenges decades of habit.”
--Jaime De La Ree
Supervisor of Engineering Analytics & Modeling, Dominion Energy
Establishing a unified asset environment
To overcome the obstacles of data access, data naming, and data misalignment, Dominion Energy used AVEVA PI System’s AF SDK to develop an application to serve as the foundation of a unified asset environment. The application connects with Dominion’s SCADA system, energy management system, advanced distribution management system, its SAP system of record, and other data sources, including ESRI, the geographic information system Dominion uses for geospatial capabilities. This unified asset environment provides enterprise visibility of contextualized data for faster decisions, particularly regarding CAPEX expenditure. Integral to Dominion Energy’s solution is asset framework, an AVEVA PI System tool that allows users to model either physical or logical objects in whichever way they wish to view those assets and their associated data. “Asset framework is an investment in our ability to innovate,” says De La Ree. “And it’s been one that’s paid dividends.” Dominion Energy’s application ingests information from all those aforementioned data sources, applies Dominion’s governance information and intelligence, and ultimately produces a centralized, evergreen asset framework model — created and maintained automatically. That means that the Engineering Analytics & Modeling team at Dominion Energy doesn’t have to manually maintain its models.
“Asset framework is an investment in our ability to innovate. And it’s been one that’s paid dividends.”
-Jaime De La Ree
Supervisor of Engineering Analytics & Modeling, Dominion Energy
Dominion Energy’s application connects to numerous systems of record and other data sources (left) and outputs an always-up-to-date asset framework model (right).
Solution
Used the asset framework software development kit in AVEVA PI System to deploy a centralized, cloud-enabled model that combines real-time data from multiple systems of record.
Used CONNECT to share generation data, allowing its customers to verify the power was sustainably sourced and to claim green power incentives.
Used the asset framework of AVEVA PI System to create a cloud-enabled unified asset environment and shared generation data with customers using CONNECT, allowing its customers to verify the power was sustainably sourced and to claim green power incentives.
Cloud-enabled proactive vigilance
Dominion Energy’s evergreen solution uses AVEVA PI Server’s asset framework to model about 28,000 elements—substations, transformers, circuits and breakers, lines, batteries, and so on. And between all these many elements, AVEVA PI Server is running upwards of 135,000 analyses, which perform calculations, capture events, and issue notifications by email. The result is proactive, effortless vigilance. On a typical day, the team wakes up to an automated email with a summary of the past night’s events—which assets were added, which were retired, and how tags were mapped. “Hopefully, all you have to do is enjoy your cup of coffee,” says Bruno Bachiega, Power and Utilities Consultant at Utilicast, Dominion Energy’s partner on this project.
Dominion Energy uses this AVEVA™ PI Vision™ display natively integrated with data from AVEVA PI Server’s asset framework to monitor its load tap changers in real time and forecast when maintenance should be performed.
After creating this evergreen asset framework model, the next step was making it accessible across the organization and beyond via the cloud. That’s why Dominion Energy deployed CONNECT to securely share select data with trusted partners, as well as renewable energy customers, shareholders, and local, state, and federal entities.
These cloud-based data-sharing capabilities not only serve as an additional selling point for Dominion customers, they also allow Dominion to scale its digital solutions easily without the need to build additional datacenters, and increase the speed-to-market of vital environmental data by 50%.
Dominion Energy has used its new system to implement a number of use cases with remarkable success. One of the first such use cases centered on the load tap changers (LTCs). In the past, due to a shortage of time and manpower, these assets were often overlooked except in the case of major anomalies. Smaller issues went by unnoticed. Now the team can monitor hundreds of LTCs in real time with just one PI tag. The asset framework model allows users at Dominion to forecast optimal maintenance dates, capture events, notify engineers of anomalies, and help them diagnose issues and take corrective action early.
But the LTCs were just the first of many use cases. Dominion Energy has also put its asset framework model to work monitoring the VOLT-VAR control, identifying anomalies and notifying engineers as necessary. To keep pace with a growing load on the system (which is expected to grow 5% annually), the model is helping engineers monitor and analyze daily peaks for specific regions, substations, and transformers.
A deployment of asset framework based entirely on templates has also allowed the Engineering Analytics & Modeling team to integrate the model seamlessly with ESRI. This integration empowers the team to deploy new geospatial capabilities for its customers, including asset monitoring and loading heat maps.
This AVEVA PI Vision display helps engineers monitor and manage daily peaks and analyze historical daily peaks.
“By utilizing CONNECT, we enable our data to reach the cloud quickly. From there, we can share it with our utility customers so that they can use it. We're turning real-time data on energy sources into a selling point for our company, and this enables our customers to select Dominion over another energy provider. The intelligence of the AVEVA PI System tools means that we can achieve speed-to-market and realize benefits more quickly, for ourselves and our customers.”
-- Riley Moore,
Manager, IT Process Systems, Dominion Energy
Today, Dominion Energy has already implemented two dozen of these business use cases, but that figure is soon to rise. By better leveraging AVEVA PI Server’s asset framework, Dominion’s team was able to decrease implementation time from months to days for new use cases. The early results of Dominion’s new application have generated so much interest across the company that the Engineering Analytics Team is beefing up its numbers to keep pace with requests for new use cases. Right now, the team counts four members. Next year, Dominion Energy plans to expand the team to 16. With an expanded team and an expanded user training program, Dominion Energy plans to continue to monitor and optimize assets across the enterprise.
Product highlights
Collect, aggregate, and enrich real-time operations data for immediate problem-solving and easily deliver formatted data to enterprise applications and advanced analytics.
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