Investor Owned Utilities

Most Investor Owned Utilities (IOU’s) have very different business requirements than their smaller cousins, Municipals and Cooperatives. Typically, they have much larger engineering staffs, larger and more complex IT infrastructures and much larger operating budgets. Additionally, with enterprise class applications like GRIDmaster, they like to execute the project all at once and in a big way. It may take a typical IOU up to a year to make a buying decision but once it is made, they move ahead very quickly. This is generally due to having the financial and personnel resources to make the project happen once the decision is made. This is quite different from the world of Municipals and Cooperatives. GRIDiant recognizes this and has designed two solutions: one for Muni’s and Co-op’s and another one for IOU’s. In both cases, the utility company gets the full solution set within the GRIDmaster product but for IOU’s, we deliver the product in a traditional enterprise application approach which is not hosted (SaaS) like the world that Muni’s and Co-op’s live in.

When we are fortunate enough to win your business, we can deliver the project in one of two ways by either taking full responsibility for the project or by partnering with a major systems integrator or consulting firm. Our partners today include KEMA, IBM, and TeraData. However, if you have another company that you prefer to work with, then we are happy to add that partner to our qualified list after they have gone through our training program. If you prefer that GRIDiant manage the delivery of the entire project, then we typically put nine people on the project for an average IOU, about 2,500 MW’s. Our project team would typically include a Project Manager, a Project Accountant, three Power Flow Engineers and four System Engineers.

At the kickoff meeting, we sit down with your project team and define your objectives (both functional as well as financial) and then we work with you to define the scope of the project. A key component of this effort is the determination of the data input from your operation that GRIDmaster will have access to for calculation purposes. This data can come from an Outage Management System (OMS), Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition system (SCADA), Geographic Information System (GIS), Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Meter Data Management System (MDMS), Load Management System (LMS), Energy Demand Response Management System (EDRM) or other data input systems. The more data we have the better GRIDmaster can perform. After that, our Power Engineers will work with your team to define the configuration of network model that has to be built for GRIDmaster to work properly. This takes about five months of a twelve month project timeline. The last seven months are used by our Systems Engineers to physically configure the system. This is not a custom coding effort but more like a PowerPoint presentation where we select options inside the software to tailor your GRIDmaster system to your needs but without re-developing the software itself. During this process, we will put your operators and engineers through our training programs either at our training facility in Raleigh, NC or at your site.

Once the system has gone through its Quality Assurance stage, it is followed by an off-line testing stage where we take your historical data and run it through the system to ensure that everything runs properly. At this point, the system is now ready to go live. Using your data center, we will then begin to introduce GRIDmaster’s capabilities to your operation. We do this slowly and our power engineers and system engineers will be there to work with your people to make the project successful.