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I will be participating in a free Enterprise Informatics webinar on the topic of reducing risk, improving efficiency and ensuring compliance. I hope you can join us. Here’s the registration link. This webinar is very timely. With $155 billion invested world-wide in 2008 and $1 billion in federal stimulus money allocated in 2009 for green energy initiatives in the U.S., the EPC (engineer-procure-construct) industry is facing an unprecedented growth opportunity as new energy construction projects begin around the globe. The EPC industry faces the major challenge of ensuring the visibility and communication of millions of pieces of information related to thousands of milestones and accessed by hundreds of contractors over several years. In order to reduce project risk, it will be imperative to manage the complete information life cycle of project-related activity from the planning, design engineering and construction phases to the operations and maintenance phase. Program managers, project managers/leaders, design engineers, quality/safety managers, change managers and compliance managers should plan on attending I look forward to speaking at this webinar and answering your questions as part of the forum. – Jon C. Arnold, Microsoft Managing Director, Worldwide Utilities Industry
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Several weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the ESS EXPO 09 Conference in San Antonio, Texas. For those of you not familiar with ESS (Environmental Support Solutions) they are (or at least were) a leading provider of Environmental, Health & Safety (EH&S) and Crisis Management software for compliance and sustainability as well as a Microsoft Gold certified partner. But what made this event even more interesting was that right before the conference IHS, another Microsoft Gold certified partner, acquired ESS, causing me to immediately wonder whether conference would be cancelled. The answer was a resounding “Absolutely not,” so off I went to San Antonio! In addition to speaking on the topic of harnessing regulatory compliance using collaboration and information sharing, IHS acquisition of ESS gave me the opportunity to meet IHS Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jerre Stead. Mr. Stead is no newbie to the role as CEO: he was chairman and CEO of Ingram, Legent, AT&T’s Global Information Solutions (NCR Corporation) as well as chairman, president and CEO of Square D Company. As you can see, Mr. Stead has no shortage of experience in running companies. Indeed, I was very impressed with Jerre. In addition to his telling some very interesting stories about working with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer over the years, I was very impressed with Jerre’s strategy of creating a company that provides companies worldwide with best-in-class products and services from IHS to meet the growing need to manage environmental, climate change and compliance issues – all from a single provider. The key here is not only providing the software which is ESS’ strength but also supplementing it with critical business information and analysis -- IHS’ core strength. As with any acquisition, a large part of the success will be IHS’ ability to retain people that helped make ESS successful. Jerre repeatedly said that he believes that people are a company’s only sustainable asset so retaining ESS’ people will surely be a key part to making the combined companies successful in the marketplace. With carbon legislation heating up all over the globe and the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 (COP15) right around the corner, I for one believe that IHS will be well positioned to fill the vital needs of the power industry as much of the burden of CO2 reductions has fallen on this industry. There’s no better time to have a partner like IHS – strengthened by the good folks at ESS – ready to help. – Jon C. Arnold
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We at Microsoft invest a significant amount of time thinking about how technology can address really tough societal challenges such as health care, education, workforce development and of course, energy and the environment. For energy and the environment we work to support the continuing movement toward a clean energy ecosystem where information technology empowers people and organizations with the software tools they need to increase energy efficiency. We believe IT accelerates the innovation and deployment of clean energy sources. You can learn more about Microsoft efforts to address the difficult challenges by clicking here. – Jon C. Arnold
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It’s my hope that our power and utilities customers are feeling the momentum from a wave of new Microsoft solutions and thought leadership documents that are geared toward helping them make the transformation to the Smart Energy Ecosystem. It’s truly an exciting time!
Yesterday, Microsoft released Windows 7 (more on that in a later blog).
And that follows the release of Microsoft Hohm several months ago and the Microsoft Worldwide Utilities group release two weeks ago of the Microsoft Smart Energy Reference Architecture (SERA), a 130-page document intended to help utilities understand how Microsoft technologies address their implementation of the smart energy ecosystem.
 The media’s reaction to our SERA announcement has been outstanding. At least 12 articles have been published to date and there are more to come, in major publications, in coming days and weeks.
To give you a quick overview, I think the quote below from a story on Smart-Grid.TMCnet.com does a great job of summing up the reaction so far:
“No vendor has all the answers, and each must play to its native strengths. In Microsoft’s case, SERA is the next step along the way to a totally integrated, end-to-end smart grid ecosystem. SERA addresses the network environment, but also ties in neatly to Microsoft’s Hohm initiative, which my ICP partner, Shidan Gouran, wrote about here last week. On its own, Hohm competes directly against Google (News - Alert) PowerMeter, but that’s where the comparison ends. Google is not a data network play, but Microsoft is. In the scenarios where a utility is deploying both Hohm and SERA, Microsoft will truly have it all, and I have no doubt they will get their share of the end-to-end market.”
Well put.
In the interest of full disclosure: It’s amazing to me that the quote above was written by another “Jon Arnold,” the co-founder of Intelligent Communications Partners, and no relation to me. What are the odds that two people would have the same name, same spelling (Jon Arnold) and be involved in the evolution of the Smart Grid? Truly amazing! Someone should blog on that! -- Jon C. Arnold
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Our phones have been ringing ringing off the hook with utilities interested in learning more about the press release we put out yesterday announcing our release of the Microsoft Smart Energy Reference Architecture (SERA), a 130 page document that is intended to help utilities understand how Microsoft technologies address their implementation of the smart energy ecosystem. 
We’ve previously talked in this blog about how utilities will need to integrate every operation of their enterprise and we’ve been working hard to spell out the nuts and bolts of that need, as well as the technologies they could deploy in that effort. But, we admit, our musings have been coming in bits and pieces. It was high time we rolled them all up in one place.
The Microsoft SERA is our comprehensive view providing our partners and power and utilities customers the details of how the Integrated Utility of the Future could work. It identifies an architecture the utilities could use to build a solid foundation and validate the steps that utilities take in developing their own smart energy infrastructure.
We realize that every utility is different, not only in their unique business models, but also in the design, hardware and software of their information technology systems as well as the regulatory models that oversee their business In fact, we’d be willing to venture that nearly every utility has, in one shape or form, it’s own Smart Grid working group that’s hashing out their company’s vision of capabilities and investments needed to implement a smarter grid and workflow.
The Microsoft SERA is intended specifically for these groups. We hope they see SERA as required reading as it offers a specific vision to utilities, providing them with a method of testing the alignment of information technology with their business processes to create an integrated utility.
We are aware that utilities worldwide are discussing such projects, as governments around the world show interest in funding national smart grid stimulus programs. To qualify for these programs, utilities will need to demonstrate that they have a sound, tested technology plan that will help them implement such smart energy systems. It’s our hope that, by learning more about Microsoft and industry partners’ technologies through our Smart Energy Reference Architectures, utilities will be able to implement solutions faster and more reliably than they could with other solutions that aren’t as well integrated or adaptable to utilities' particular needs. As we’ve said before, Microsoft technology is in place in some form at nearly every utility company around the world. It is only natural then that utilities might have interest in maximizing those investments, and ensure that they integrate with their other in-place technologies.
We’ll definitely be writing more about SERA in coming days and weeks, but in the meantime, we’d like to hear from those Smart Grid working groups out there. Take a look at the document and provide us your feedback. This is a living document, particularly where standards and common interfaces are discussed. We’d like to learn more about your view on these matters, to make this document as complete as possible. And if you want a presentation on the SERA, we’d be happy to offer that too. In the meantime, please enjoy this first cut at a complete vision for what the smart energy information technology systems of the future will look like. Let the discussions begin! – Larry Cochrane, Senior Technology Strategist, Microsoft Worldwide Utilities
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It’s a proud day for us here at Microsoft as Seattle City Light announced today that it will offer its customers the ability to link their electricity consumption data with Microsoft Hohm, the online application that tracks energy use and provides personalized energy conservation recommendations.
It’s only fitting that Seattle City Light became the first as many Microsoft employees are customers of Seattle City Light. You can read more about the announcement here, here and here.
There are a number of other utilities across the United States who are working with us to offer Hohm to their customers and we look forward to making several more announcements in the future. Hohm will be a valuable component of a utility’s ability to take energy efficiency to the next level for consumers and eventually create demand response opportunities.
Announcements and partnerships like today's will make all of this possible. – Jon Arnold
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While Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is viewed by many as a pie in the sky solution to the challenges of CO2 emissions it is receiving more attention now that policy makers are focused on the climate change issue worldwide.
CCS uses various techniques to scrub and capture CO2 from generation plant flue gasses, and then pipes the CO2 to an underground cavern or ships it for deep ocean storage. It’s costly, but has proven effective and may help policy makers achieve their goals.
In the United States, the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill (H.R.2454) passed the U.S. House of Representatives a few months back. Globally, general concern over climate is driving the discussions that will be taken up at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. Similar carbon reduction legislation either exists or is underway in other G-20 countries such as UK, Germany, Japan, and Norway.
As mentioned, CCS is not entirely new. In Norway, Statoil’s Sleipner West oil and gas field in the North Sea has been sequestering CO2 since 1996. A map of existing and proposed CCS locations is maintained by the Scottish Center for Carbon Storage, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. Simply perusing the listed pushpins provides a view of the large number of new initiatives that soon will be established.
Microsoft partner Alstom and its customer AEP have moved the commercialization of CCS one step closer to reality with the successful demonstration of the AEP Mountaineer Plant CCS Project. Philippe Joubert, Alstom EVP and President of the Alstom Power Systems business pointed out on a recent CNBC interview that coal and oil are such a large part (60%) of the global energy mix that CCS will be an unavoidable enabler.
CCS projects have experienced one critical stumbling block: funding. CCS implementations can exceed $1 billion – an investment amount that few utilities can afford, especially with a technology that is not fully proven. It is significant that the EU, the U.S., and Canada have begun allocating funds to further the development of this fledgling technology. The EU established a $1.46B CCS stimulus fund to demonstrate the technology in coal fired power plants. The US has identified $3.5B in stimulus funding for CCS and Secretary Chu has restarted the FutureGen Alliance project. Canada has set aside $650M and Australia is investing $1.2B. The level of these investments is unprecedented.
Still, the question remains: Will CCSS really take off?
In Norway, policy makers set their carbon tax at $50 per metric ton, a figure which significantly increased the incremental cost of energy. With this added cost, the economic business justification for CCS is evident.
But if carbon credits cost only $20 per metric ton, will the marginal cost justify the cost of CCS? Or, will generating companies be better off to rely on the emissions allowances? These trade-offs are not quite so clear given current CCS cost projections. We need rapid advances in reducing CCS costs to ensure broad adoption of the technology. The large number of new demonstration projects and the various government stimulus funding sources should help accelerate the understanding of commercial production costs.
Regardless, some issues will remain. The US Senate may help support the financial case because they are looking at more stringent targets than those in the House bill. The environmental impact of sequestered carbon still is a concern to some. However, it is clear that unfettered CO2 plant emissions are not sustainable. Based upon the success of StatOil’s Steiner West field, and of the Alstom/AEP Mountaineer Project, CCS technology appears viable, and commercial availability may not be as far off as you think!
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In one of its frequent updates on Smart Grid developments, Monday’s Wall Street Journal story “Stimulus Funds Speed Transformation Toward ‘Smart Grid’” includes mention of home energy management solution, Microsoft Hohm, although the reporters didn’t call it out by its name.
All in all, it’s a decent story on how $4.5 billion in smart grid funding included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is being viewed by companies with component parts for the coming smart energy ecosystem.
Our partner Pcubed is worth mentioning here as they are helping companies navigate the complex application process for federal funding assistance for renewable energy and smart grid projects. They are using the new Microsoft solutions, Stimulus360, to help organizations that allocate and receive ARRA funds to monitor progress, submit reports, and provide intuitive views of the data for different audiences as they work to accomplish their ARRA goals. The situation we all want to avoid is a delay in the implementation of Smart Grid projects once the funding is received because systems are not in place to provide the tracking, compliance and reporting needed. The combination of Pcubed and Stimulus 360 can help avoid the “be careful what you ask for” scenario! – Jon Arnold
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We have written before how important collaboration and knowledge management is becoming in the Power & Utilities Industry worldwide. It’s a key component of our strategy for creating the integrated Utility of the future -- an integration of IT and operational systems that readily presents information to users based upon their needs rather than application architecture.
Whether a company is growing customer relationships, accelerating innovation, driving corporate performance, managing governance, risk and compliance or improving operations, SharePoint has become a key enabling platform for the Utility enterprise. We have written about this before in our white paper which can be downloaded here.
While SharePoint has become a key enabling technology across the Utility ecosystem, it’s important to understand what the product roadmap looks like and what the next wave of innovation is that will help accelerate the journey to the integrated Utility of the Future and allow us to be successful in creating things like the smart grid, optimizing the generation portfolio with renewables and dealing with the aging workforce.
A good peek into what’s next can be found in J. Peter Bruzzese’s Infoworld column entitled “An early look at SharePoint 2010”. This once SharePoint “avoider” he has some very good insights on the next version coming out next year. Enjoy. - Jon
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Last week marked an important milestone: The Community Technology Preview release of StreamInsight (formerly known as Microsoft’s platform for Complex Event Processing - CEP), is going live as a public download! You can find the download page by clicking here.
Why is this cool?
StreamInsight provides a solution for continuous and incremental processing of unending sequences of events (that’s a mouth full, to say the least!) from multiple sources with near-zero latency.
If you look at industries such as power & utilities, manufacturing, oil and gas, financial services, health care, web analytics, and IT and data center monitoring, you can start to visualize a scenario involving lots of data being generated very quickly, creating need for companies to look for patterns and events that might trigger other processes.
An example of leveraging CEP is fielding outage events from customer meters, consolidating those events into streams supplying both Outage Management and Customer Service. Microsoft StreamInsight can be used to analyze the individual outages and identify faults, in realtime in sequence, and provide the information to downstream users – such as Outage Management. Streams can feed other streams so individual meter events showing customer outages can be consolidated and replaced at the system level with a single consolidated feeder segment outage alarm. Thus, insight from new AMI systems can be leveraged without exposing operators in the call center or control room to an avalanche of fine grained alarms.
In a nut shell, StreamInsight allows software developers to create innovative solutions in the domain of Complex Event Processing that satisfy such needs. It enables information technology with the ability to monitor, mine, and develop insights from continuous unbounded data streams and correlate constantly changing events with rich payloads in near real time. Industry specific solution developers (ISVs) and developers of custom applications have the opportunity to innovate on and utilize proven, flexible, and familiar Microsoft technology and rely on existing development skills when using the StreamInsight platform.
Some of the key feature areas are:
· Derive meaningful and relevant information from data/events streams through complex patterns. These patterns can be defined using a declarative query paradigm based on well-defined streaming semantics with LINQ as query language.
· For the development of applications, adapters, and analytics, the user can rely on well-established and powerful development frameworks and tools such as .NET, LINQ, and Microsoft Visual Studio.
· The platform integrates with various data sources and sinks through input and output adapters. The framework to build domain-specific adapters utilizes a .NET API to make adoption of the platform easy. Independence between adapters and queries facilitates seamless integration of real-time and historical analysis.
· The platform architecture supports a variety of deployment options, from scenarios with a low-footprint embedded option to high-end server deployments.
· A rich set of manageability features such as a management interface, a diagnostic interface and a debugging tool are provided as part of the platform.
This is our first public beta and we would like to invite you to try out our bits and provide feedback. The best way to communicate your feedback is to report any bugs or feature requests at SQL Server Connect. It now also includes a version and category specifically targeted for StreamInsight. All bugs, issues, and feature requests submitted through this tool will go directly to the development team.
Along with the StreamInsight .msi you are also able to download a .zip file containing documentation (also online on MSDN) and samples. We strongly recommend that you use the samples to become familiar with our product and its capabilities. Moreover, we will guide you through various aspects of the product on our StreamInsight Blog. The StreamInsight Forum is closely monitored by the development team and provides you with a basic level of support.
If you are interested in other SQL Server CTPs, please visit this site as well: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 August CTP.
We would like to thank you for your continued interest in StreamInsight and are very much looking forward to your experiences and feedback!
- Jon Arnold and Larry Cochrane
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Microsoft partner ActionBase is receiving a great deal of attention for its very popular new Human Process Solutions, which essentially allow organizations to effectively manage human processes and human interactions in innovative ways.
The company recently announced Audit.Tracker, a new software solution that enables tracking and control of an organization’s entire audit process. We’ve also posted new material about ActionBase solutions on our Web site: a video here and solution sheet here.
Essentially, ActionBase helps companies improve everyday work interactions among its personnel by offering them easy, simple to use software options for capturing and updating status changes in projects at every step along a process. For the utility company, where every business process is inter-related in some way, this sort of solution can quickly become indispensable. – Jon Arnold
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Power Engineering, the highest circulation utility trade magazine in the United States, carries in its July edition a story co-written by Larry Cochrane, our utilities technology strategist, and myself, on “Future Opportunities for the Energy Ecosystem.” It’s the Peak Load feature article. In the story, we note that:
The industry is entering an unprecedented era, one rich with innovation around energy-producing equipment and active participation from consumers in the overall energy ecosystem. The era will see new solutions such as renewables, energy storage and demand response that will radically change the way we think about power systems.
In this new era, solutions to maintain the grid will range from the smallest sensor for measuring and exposing energy use and carbon footprints to high-performance streaming complex event processing. To control the growing number of devices, grid solutions will need the capability to handle Internet-scale data acquisition. They will also need the scale to handle large, complex, real-time hierarchical network reliability solutions, as well as massive data storage and analysis. All of that said, flexibility is critical because distributed generation or demand response that will work in one area may not work in another, displacing today’s radial, homogenous paradigm.
Check it out! – Jon Arnold
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Utilities concerned about their IT systems’ limited potential for adjusting to the future Smart Grid data environment should read a new IDC Whitepaper, sponsored by Microsoft, which evaluates the likely needs and infrastructure solutions for operating in a transformed energy industry.
The paper “Building Scale for the Utility Company’s Future” is available on the front page of the utilities portion of Microsoft’s website and it succinctly describes the data challenges facing utility companies:
To be prepared for future demands on the utility industry, utility companies will need to choose hardware and infrastructure applications that are fit to purpose and capable of:
· Processing large volumes of data (terabytes and possibly petabytes)
· Providing high data quality at various levels of precision
· Accommodating multiple types of data (transactional and time series, structured and unstructured) matched with the time period
· Maintaining high availability of data with successful failover without data loss
· Supporting multiple latency requirements (high, low, and medium)
That’s the core of the issue – exponential data growth and handling -- and it’s intellectually understandable from IDC’s introduction. But looking at the challenge with the help of a graph really makes the issue really come to life.
The following Electric Power Research Institute graphic is on page 9 of the IDC paper and I’m sure you’ll degree it’s dramatic:
Thankfully, the paper isn’t intended to scare. It goes on to identify the concomitant data challenges, like quality, matching and security and then offers two case study examples of utilities that have tackled various data challenges in recent years:
AGL: Phoenix Rising
In July 2006, [AGL Energy Limited, Australia’s largest integrated renewable energy company] embarked on an application consolidation initiative — Project Phoenix — that would reduce the total cost of ownership and inefficiency of supporting 11 different customer information systems (CIS) and 100 other applications. The company wanted to take this opportunity not only to reduce costs but also to ensure that all customers are treated in the same way using a single set of processes. According to AGL, "The goal was a system that would enable AGL to house all its customers on a single integrated platform that could scale as new channels emerged and provide consistent information across the various business functions."
Entergy: Preparing the Changing Nuclear Workforce
Like many other owners of nuclear power generation, Entergy is faced with managing the impact of an aging nuclear workforce. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 30% of the nation's nuclear engineers, 26% of its reactor operators, and 26% of its nuclear technicians are
expected to retire by 2012. The challenge for the utility is to capture this experiential knowledge and transfer it to the incoming workforce to be able to access as much knowledge as possible needed to run the plants. Each nuclear facility is unique and has its own rich collection of documentation that needs to be easily accessible to staff.
Information management applications support the transfer of knowledge to the next generation of plant engineers and operators by ensuring that correct and accurate information is readily and easily accessible by plant workers. Since 1995, Entergy had been running eB Nuclear Suite from Enterprise Informatics for Entergy Regulated sites for managing storage/retrieval of plant information and records.
In 2006, Entergy made a decision to upgrade to the latest version of eB for Nuclear suite based on new enhancements and an updated architecture as a result of monitoring changing market conditions to identify newly emerging opportunities to further reduce cost and improve service.
Both case studies explore the role that SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 played in accomplishing AGL and Entergy’s business objectives. The paper offers a chart that explains various SQL Server 2008 features, including integration services, data warehousing, operation data store, analysis services, reporting services, geospatial data types, backup and compression, dynamic management views, and encryption.
It’s my hope you’ll take a look through this paper. It offers a very complete roadmap for those utilities considering their information technology infrastructure needs in this new energy era by identifying and addressing the ways that utilities can apply technology to the challenges they face. – Jon Arnold
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