I had occasion today to participate in a webcast with Wanyonyi Kendrick CIO at JEA (formerly Jacksonville Electric Authority). JEA is the eighth largest municipal utility in the U.S. with 390,000 electric customers, 279,000 water customers and 208,000 sewer customers. It also has one of the sharpest CIOs in the utility industry in Kendrick.

 

The other thing JEA has at this point is probably one of the most-advanced Intelligent Utility Enterprise/Smart Grid (IUE/SG) programs in the country, although it isn’t called that. JEA has just completed a major new CIS implementation (Oracle-SPL) in a year-and-a-half, as opposed to the three to five years that used to be the norm for such implementations. However, JEA also has an on-going AMI implementation project, a data warehouse that integrates real-time data from the grid for load research and transformer load management, with plans to add energy management and market research. A centralized Meter Data Management system is the depository of record for daily/hourly readings and the CIS translates everything into financials for the business. 

 

All of this is tied together through service-oriented architecture (SOA) for flexibility and adding new elements.  As demand response, home automation, and direct load-control becomes necessary as energy shortages become more acute, Kendrick and JEA plan to use its Cellnet AMI as the home gateway with links to its control center and customer service center. There even is a system to deal with distributed generation and net billing.

There are other utilities that are as far along as JEA, but not too many at this stage. As the pressures of higher electric and fuel prices continue to accelerate and generation options disappear under the assault of Global Warming, all utilities are going to have to turn to the IUE/SG to keep the lights on, at least part of the time. JEA’s model is an early, good one.

The main trick at this point is to get operations and IT to work together--they are at JEA.  If you want to see a fairly comprehensive system in operation, check out JEA.