Interesting blog entry by Don McDonnell of the McDonnell Group concerning Microsoft: Hohm of the Smart Grid?  - Jon

Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie took the occasion of his keynote address at the Edison Electric Institute on June 24 to introduce the U.S. utility industry to Microsoft Hohm, a new online application that enables home and business energy consumers to better understand their power usage, get personalized electricity saving recommendations and become a part of the clean energy community.

As part of the press announcement accompanying Mundie’s speech, Microsoft is partnering with four industry leading partners for its introduction of Hohm, including Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Seattle City Light, Xcel Energy and Puget Sound Energy. Hohm is intended for any residential consumer wishing to lower their energy bill and reduce their impact on the environment. The application will be available in a few days at no cost to anyone in the United States and will be can be accessed directly by visiting www.microsoft-hohm.com.

Hohm is the connecting component for Microsoft’s view of how utilities will connect and integrate in the future. Hohm will eventually allow utilities and customers to react to price and usage signals and bring price rationality into the consumption and use of electricity. In order to capitalize on this new capability, utilities will seek new analytics, collaboration and communication tools, as well as greater flexibility for database, server and business process solutions.

A wide range of supporting information on the integrated utility will continue to be made available to you. More publicly available information about Hohm can be viewed at:

· Blog: http://blog.microsoft-hohm.com

· Provide Feedback: http://feedback.microsoft-hohm.com

· Twitter: www.twitter.com/microsofthohm (@microsofthohm)

We’ll be writing more on Hohm in coming days, I can assure you. – Jon Arnold

We’ve written before about how utility companies will need increasing integration among their IT and operational systems in order to meet the demands of the smart energy ecosystem, the one with two way power flows between consumer and power company, especially as fleets of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles come into being and renewable power sources add distributed generation to the grid.

Our partner Mariner, a company specializing in business intelligence, data warehousing, enterprise reporting and performance management solutions, has recently released a 9-minute video demonstration of its performance management solution that’s built on a raft of Microsoft solutions to create a dashboard system for monitoring fleet performance.

The video is built around a day in the life of Mariner Power & Light, a hypothetical utility company with three million customers and a fleet of power plants. The situation starts with James, a vice president for fossil generation, noticing an item in a dashboard that’s specifically tailored to top management’s concerns. Namely, the VP notices that the fleet is not operating at established levels and isn’t meeting commitments to the grid. Red flags of increased costs go up as  less efficient plants had to make up the shortfall.

James calls Nick, a plant facility manager to find out what the problem is and whether it can be fixed.

Nick, enabled by integrated dashboards of his own, tracks the problem to one plant. Like a CSI sleuth, Nick clicks through a number of key performance indicators to narrow the glitch to a specific plant issue. After tracking delays in work order completions, James discovers the plant was not brought on line after a scheduled outage due to difficulty with some parts. And then, as with so many efforts to streamline costs, the parts issue comes down to a new inventory roll-out program that could affect all the plants.

In response, Nick identifies the inventory roll out as challenge that needs to be addressed through MPL’s continuous improvement program that assigns owners to correcting the problem. 

The video clearly demonstrates how utility management can benefit from having fleet-wide performance data available at their fingertips. Not only can executives and plant managers identify problems, they can work to end future issues of the same type through an integrated communication platform that puts everyone on the same page.

We salute Mariner for their work in putting this video together. It’s easy to understand and it clearly shows the power of dashboards to integrate plant operations, trouble shoot current problems, and identify future potential pitfalls. As utilities work to keep their reliability up to the mark in a new operating environment, they’ll find that such dashboards are indispensable to their mission. – Jon Arnold

For those readers interested in learning more about Microsoft's efforts to work with the utility industry to implement Smart Grid standards, please see yesterday's blog post by Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president, on his recent trip to the White House to discuss this effort. Microsoft is actively participating in the National Institute of Standards and Technology Workshops that are taking place this week. See: NIST Announces Second Smart Grid Standards Workshop. – Jon Arnold

Areva and Microsoft have extended their collaboration to include the development and deployment of Smart Grid management solutions for the world wide power industry.

You can read the full press release here, on Areva’s site for the details, but it’s worth noting from the release that our companies’ top areas of concerns are security and further integration of AREVA’s applications with Microsoft Office tools and enterprise business processes.

Areva is focusing on delivering applications for smarter electric dispatch, integrated distribution management, and demand response in order to offer the utilities the opportunity to reduce outages, shorten the ones that do occur, restore service faster, and new Smarter Grid capabilities including the ability to manage distributed generation and a variety of renewable sources of energy . All of these must be delivered in a secure fashion, in integrated formats that allow people throughout the utility to work with the information as it is generated. An early version of which was shown at DistribuTECH back in February of this year.

We continue to believe that tomorrow’s utility will require the type of integration that Areva (a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner) and Microsoft are working to offer.

Toward that end, we can safely say that Microsoft based Energy Delivery solutions will utilize a wide range of MS products and technologies including:

As Energy Delivery Solutions evolve and become smarter to support the Smart Grid, we will see an explosion of data creating the need to visualize the information, apply analytics and business intelligence, and create collaboration among teams using the information in role based productivity scenarios. Our partners and customers are starting to move in this direction now as we are seeing the adoption of Silverlight, Virtual Earth and interest in the Azure service platform.

Consider the distribution management system that’s been developed with Areva. It’s built on Vista, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 and is currently being deployed at a large U.S. utility. The chart to the right indicates how it works.

We plan to have many more releases in coming weeks about our Smart Grid related work with partners. Great job, Areva! We’re happy to be working with you. – Larry Kuhl

To be successful power and utility companies must manage processes that are mainly human centric and require a lot of coordination and cooperation both inside and outside the company. Those changing processes must react to events and change all the time, creating possibilities for unstructured approaches to problem solving (and headaches for management), even while supporting customers and keeping costs low.

In the normal course of everyday power and utility business, companies rely on emails, document sharing and Excel spreadsheets to manage the wide range of challenges they face. In fact, emails are now used to manage projects, collaborate, schedule and track projects, to name but a few processes. But management by email has limitations, including broken strings, or people being left out of a series of communications. At the same time, managers will likely experience email overflow or a clear understanding about a project’s status.

Two recent articles in the Financial Times and Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal offer excellent analysis about the over-reliance on email that’s typical in today’s office environment. They’re definitely worth a read. The Financial Times story notes that “60-80 percent of processes that make a business run happen under the radar and are managed via documents and email.” The story notes how ad-hoc, unstructured email managed processes cause information overload, waste employee time and lose opportunities.

But the point here is that company’s do have options to overcome the shortcomings of process-by-email and, as the Financial Times article says, today’s current business environment offers a great rationale for every business to see whether money can be saved with better process enablement.

Microsoft’s gold-certified partner ActionBase has developed a Human Process Management System (HPMS) which is an Office Business Application (OBA) solution integrated within Outlook, Office and MOSS to enable the creation, tracking and follow-up of unstructured processes such as audit, compliance, health safety and environment, bid and proposal tracking among other processes.

ActionBase has deployed the system at more than 100 organizations including E.ON UK, Israel Electric Corporation BG Group, BayernOil and Nexen. 

As described in the online KMWorld.com tradezine, E.ON deployed ActionBase human process management as part of its Action Tracking initiative.

As background, the E.ON group is one of the world's largest investor-owned power and gas companies. They employ around 17,000 people in the UK and over 93,000 worldwide. Over the last few years they have been acquiring companies in the UK, Sweden, Italy, and Spain. These units operated within the EON Group more or less as independent market units.

In 2008 E.ON made a drive to centralize key functions, like energy trading, to create a more pan-European approach to operations and asset management. The objectives were to drive out efficiencies, take advantage of economies of scale within the procurement arena and define a common approach and standards where possible. The overall goal was to give the organization greater flexibility to respond to volatile energy markets.

While market units in each country manage their operations on a day-to-day basis, more and more of the strategy, direction and setting of standards is now determined by central functions, mostly based in Germany. This change resulted in the need for greater collaboration and coordinating of processes within and across the organization and the use of common systems.

In sum, the strategy required the creation of an integrated business and centralized corporate knowledgebase, and to focus on business processes when dealing with compliance and regulations.

ActionBase was then called upon to enable managers to initiate and engage in human business processes that might typically be handled through documents, Microsoft Excel checklists and e-mail correspondence. But with ActionBase, power and utilities E.ON was able to use a structured editing environment to define a process in a Microsoft Word editor. Users were then able to save documents in a system which in turn extracts the relevant information and automatically sends the process activity to the relevant assignee.

By using ActionBase, the information was no longer buried in the text of emails -- each process step was recorded and executed.

ActionBase optimizes workflows because, as the process work is being carried out, updates, status changes, and any other process related to the event are captured in the system and are propagated back to the same Word document so that it reflects the status of the process. Follow up becomes a breeze.

Clearly, as more demands are made on utilities, whether for environmental compliance or full scale upgrade of the grid, innovative solutions like these will help control and manage the mishmash of processes that would otherwise occur.

To read more about Human Process Management Systems and how they operate, I encourage you to read ActionBlog, the ActionBase blog. – Jon Arnold

The March 30 issue of EnergyBiz Insider, a weekly email report from EnergyCentral.com, focused its story “Jolting the Energy Sector” around the emergence of the Smart Energy Ecosystem and provides some comments by yours truly.

The news report is great third party verification of the fast track evolution of the Smart Energy Ecosystem now occurring in the global utility sector.

As you’ll note, my comments focused on the need for technology to enable companies the ability “to be good stewards of the environment” even though the challenges “will make putting a man on the moon look like child’s play.” Success means more than just the smart grid, it’s about the whole value chain from optimization of the generation portfolio with scaling up renewables, to a smarter grid with transmission where we need it and a smart distribution system, and energy efficiency for businesses and consumers. This creates what we call the “Smart Energy Ecosystem”. The full article is available here. – Jon Arnold

A couple of weeks ago I traveled across Canada for the purpose of meeting with customers and partners and, as usual, I gained some great new insights into what is going on in different parts of the world. The message I heard: “All is not lost.” Indeed, far from it.

 Yes, despite the doom and gloom that’s so frequently heard in the international news, things are moving ahead in many parts of the world! That news was welcome (as was the winter weather (cold in Toronto and snow in Calgary!), as a respite from the warm winters I experience at my Florida home).

During my travels, I thought that with the economic downturn and the new economy that we live in today that I would find Canadian utilities taking a very conservative approach to implementing new initiatives and projects, to conserve cash and wait out the economic uncertainty.

OK, Maybe it wasn’t that cold! (Jon at Banff National Park, in Alberta's Rockies, Canada)