OpenViz helps ConEd achieve a balance of power
Imagine being responsible for the network that distributes power to millions of residents and countless businesses across Manhattan. Now imagine having to predict problems such as power failures by looking at hundreds of rows and columns of data on a screen or on paper.
With the energy crises and rolling blackouts that have recently plagued California and threatened Washington and Oregon, the thought is enough to make most folks appreciate their jobs even on a bad day.
But that is exactly how Consolidated Edison in New York used to monitor its power distribution across Manhattan Borough and Westchester County. In fact, ConEd operators had to monitor rows and columns of data from five applications residing in scattered locations, including legacy systems and homegrown applications the company had built over the years.
The need to integrate that data and implement a user-friendly interface led Con Ed to Advanced Visual Systems (AVS) and its OpenViz data visualization technology.
ConEd chose AVS, based in Waltham, Mass., in part because it was far easier to integrate its legacy systems and the data housed in homegrown applications with OpenViz than it would have been to migrate the data to new systems.
"This new functionality was implemented without tossing out any of our older systems," says Ted Maffetone, ConEd's department manager of distribution engineering. "We're just displaying it in a more modern way."
In addition to connecting disparate data sources, ConEd needed a highly scalable system. The company monitors 2,500 power distribution devices in Manhattan, which Artie Kressner, ConEd's director of research and development, estimates to be the equivalent of 25,000 nodes on a computer network. The OpenViz infrastructure is capable of supporting the number of network devices they currently have, as well as scaling to support more devices, which ConEd plans to add at a rapid pace, Kressner says.
Naturally, the company needed to retain its existing infrastructure, applications, and data while moving to the new presentation format.
"This is a continuous data stream, 24-by-seven-by-365, hopefully forever," Kressner says.
The process of implementing the cutting-edge technology proved relatively painless. Over a period of about six months, ConEd worked with AVS' team of consultants, who took care of the coding while ConEd handled the deployment.
"If we had done this the historical way, with custom-coding, it would have cost a couple million dollars and taken years," says Kressner, who declined to comment on the actual cost of implementation, other than to say it was fairly inexpensive.
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