Services
GRIDiant offers a suite of services which we called GRIDcare. There are seven separate services that we supply to our customers, which can be purchased either separately or as an integrated package. These services include Program Management, Project Management, Power Flow Consulting, System Design, System Integration, Training, and Software Maintenance.
Program Management
In some situations, the client will have a very large project requiring the cooperation of multiple suppliers. In these types of programs, there needs to be one overall manager. Quite often, our customers choose a large, mainstream system integrator such as Accenture or IBM to run these types of programs. However, sometimes our customers do not want other companies involved but prefer the supplier of the software to run and take full responsibility for the program’s success. GRIDiant believes that it should be flexible enough to go either way with its clients.
Project Management
Most of our engagements with clients are either simple projects or they are a component project that is part of an overall program, as described above. In these cases, we assign one of our PMI certified project managers to the project. This person is tasked by GRIDiant to be your single point of accountability and responsibility within GRIDiant’s operation. He is tasked to establish and manage the project schedule, develop the project scope with your project personnel, procure and manage the necessary resources within the Company to resolve technical issues, ensure the engineering integrity of the project, manage the profit and loss of the project, elevate very difficult issues to senior management, conduct the go-live effort, ensure accurate project accounting and billing, and obtain final customer acceptance.
Power Flow Consulting
All of our projects require extensive power network modeling to ensure that the GRIDmaster application suite delivers the projected and expected value. As such, we maintain a group of experienced power flow engineers to work with you on your project. The key point to understand is that the power flow calculation is very non-linear and requires GRIDiant to complete a power flow study as part of the network model. The goal of a power flow study is to obtain complete voltage angle and magnitude information for each bus in a power system for specified load and generator real power and voltage conditions. Once this information is known, real and reactive power flow on each branch as well as generator reactive power output can be analytically determined. Due to the nonlinear nature of this problem, numerical methods are employed to obtain a solution that is within an acceptable tolerance. The solution to the power flow problem begins with identifying the known and unknown variables in the system. The known and unknown variables are dependent on the type of bus. A bus without any generators connected to it is called a Load Bus. With one exception, a bus with at least one generator connected to it, is called a Generator Bus. The exception is one arbitrarily-selected bus that has a generator. This bus is referred to as the Slack Bus. In the power flow problem, it is assumed that the real power PD and reactive power QD at each Load Bus are known. For this reason, Load Buses are also known as PQ Buses. For Generator Buses, it is assumed that the real power generated PG and the voltage magnitude |V| is known. For the Slack Bus, it is assumed that the voltage magnitude |V| and voltage phase Θ are known. Therefore, for each Load Bus, both the voltage magnitude and angle are unknown and must be solved for. For each Generator Bus, the voltage angle must be solved for; there are no variables that must be solved for the Slack Bus. In a system with N buses and R generators, there are then 2(N − 1) − (R − 1) unknowns. In order to solve for the 2(N − 1) − (R − 1) unknowns, there must be 2(N − 1) − (R − 1) equations that do not introduce any new unknown variables. The possible equations to use are power balance equations, which can be written for real and reactive power for each bus. The GRIDiant power flow engineers will produce a complete network model and associated report as part of the project deliverable.
System Design
For each GRIDmaster project we deliver, there are two major components: the network model as described above and the system architecture and design that will be used to implement GRIDmaster. In addition to the power flow engineer(s) assigned to your project, we will also assign a system engineer(s) to work with your people on the design of the carrying IT system. This only applies to an IOU as we use a SaaS (hosted) environment for Municipals and Cooperatives and the customer does not have to worry about the IT system. However, for larger installations (such as IOU’s or large Muni’s), our system engineers will work with your IT people to ensure that your IT equipment is sized properly for memory, speed, communications bandwidth, and operations display frequency. This also includes the data warehouse sub-system as it is crucial for clients to have enough storage capacity to accommodate the massive data input needs of GRIDmaster.
System Integration
To meet your financial objectives with GRIDmaster, it must have data and lots of it. The more data you can provide to the core algorithm, the better your network model and subsequent optimization will be. Data is usually brought into the system from many different input systems. These might include Outage Management Systems (OMS), Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition systems (SCADA), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Meter Data Management Systems (MDMS), Load Management Systems (LMS), Energy Demand Response Management Systems (EDRM) and several others. GRIDiant has designed a set of Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) that allow us to connect with each of your data input systems. However, it does require programming on your side of the API to actually bring in the data. GRIDiant can develop these for you or you can do them yourself or with your preferred system integrator.
Training
As with any new system, it takes some effort to learn how to use it and GRIDmaster is not different. We offer several different training courses dependent on the level of computer software expertise the user has had in the past. This ranges from operator training to engineering training. Our courses can be provided at your site or at our corporate training center in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Maintenance
Software maintenance is a traditional software offering and is fairly automatic. It is based on the price of the GRIDmaster software you purchase and is always 20% of the original license fee per year and runs for a five year period. This package gives you access to an experienced GRIDmaster professional during coverage hours, which run 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM EST, Monday through Friday. It also provides you with all upgrades at the same software revision level. For example, if you purchased GRIDmaster v2.0, then you would receive all 2+ revisions without any additional cost. However, movement from v2.3 (for example) to v3.0 is considered an upgrade because of major functionality addition and that comes with a cost.