Verendrye Electric Cooperative
For years, engineers at Verendrye Electric Cooperative, with offices in Minot and Velva, N.D., were using seasonal models to make predictions on energy usage and consumption. The models were simply estimations, and they often found themselves over or underestimating equipment sizes, having to redo installations in the field. They were seeking a way to achieve greater accuracy; that’s when they deployed NISC Operations Analytics (OA). “Before, we would typically have two models, a winter and a summer model,” said Brad Doll, P.E., Electrical Engineer at Verendrye. “It was a worst-case scenario. Now, in using NISC Operations Analytics, we basically have a model for every hour of the day and it’s much more accurate. The data we get through OA is actual meter data. There’s no allocation and there’s no estimating. So, we’re looking at a true system load on the system when we do our analysis.” NISC Operations Analytics harnesses the granularity of time-series data, enabling users to look beyond peak system analysis to better grasp real system performance. OA seamlessly pulls together data from a multitude of sources, including NISC’s Meter Data Management System (MDMS), the Member’s Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system and GIS in two ways - the first is via an automated web solution that displays transformer loading and line losses (as well as SCADA and consumer voltage readings, when available). Users can adjust the report criteria to meet their specific needs. The second is through EDD’s Distributed Engineering Workstation (DEW). This engineering analysis software, along with NISC’s Cooperative Cloud, calculates the values displayed in OA and allows large quantities of data to be easily processed and reviewed. When DEW is installed on a user’s desktop, it becomes even more [...]