Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) or drones open up a new future for measurement and monitoring. The opportunities for improving safety, resilience and reliability are striking. However, several questions quickly surface for electric cooperatives when they look at integrating UAS into their operations. How do I effectively implement UAS technology at my co-op? How can I work to​​ improve my SAIDI numbers? How do I measure success? What is my path for capturing the most value for my co-op? ​ ​This session covered how you can get more value from UAS with strong planning and operational practices. Expert guidance was provided on three fundamentals: 1) acquiring the most valuable data on flights, 2) getting the data into a UAS platform and 3) how to succeed with analysis and action. How you integrate the data captured by a UAS platform into day-to-day utility operations is where the value is. See how you can get the data and use it to enable data-driven decisions.

Speakers:

Eric Bitzko
System Maintenance Supervisor and UAV Principal, Pedernales Electric Cooperative
Robert Henley
Vice President of Energy Solutions, PrecisionHawk
Stanley McHann
Senior Research Engineer, NRECA

Tuesday, September 29, 2020 | NOW ON DEMAND
Analytics: The "Future Of" Turning Your Data into Action

You have goals for your operations, and you have lots of data that you can turn into actionable information. New options to build your own data platform are available to co-ops. This is where you can use your AMI, SCADA, and sensor data to better inform operational decisions. In this session, we provided guidance to help you identify data types that are important to capture to meet common operational goals at your co-op and showcased data platforms available to co-ops today. This session also covered how to visualize the information using the latest technologies. Finally, we will describe new research being done at NRECA with national labs and electric co-ops that is working to create additional tools for improved data analytics. Access this session to learn how the future of data analytics is here and learn how to use this amazing new technology.

Venkat Banunarayan​an
Vice President of Integrated Grid, NRECA​
Stanley McHann
Senior Research Engineer, NRECA
Meredith Miller
Data Scientist, NRECA

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 | NOW ON DEMAND
Situational Awareness: The "Future Of" ​Distribution Operations

There’s power in understanding what’s going on over your networks. New platforms are emerging that can quickly monitor the enormous data flow from utility devices and systems and flag the network traffic that looks unusual or suspicious. This is situational awareness, and it has moved to the distribution level. NRECA research has been developing technology for this capability and demonstrating it at cooperatives. These systems act in near real-time and have built in grid analytics. They can help co-op staff take notice and interpret whether the traffic on a network is normal. Those observations turn information into a valuable asset for cyber monitoring, grid operations, and data analytics. Access this session to hear from co-ops who are using enhanced situational awareness for better decisions and actions.

Don Bowman
Vice President of Engineering & Operations, Wake Electric Membership Corporation
Doug Lambert
Senior Principal Grid Solutions, NRECA
​ Bobby Smith
President & CEO, New Horizon Electric Cooperative, Inc.​​

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