GE Digital’s ADMS Updates Drive Operations Visibility, Power Restoration Automation and Enhanced Outage Management

• End-to-End Solution Enables Electric Utilities to Meet Customer Expectations of a Reliable and Resilient Distribution Grid Via Next-Generation Control and Optimization
• Approximately 25% of the world’s meters served by ADMS are already managed by GE Digital’s solution. Leading utilities around the world like i-DE in Spain, UK Power Networks in the UK and PPL in the USA benefitting from GE Digital’s ADMS

SAN RAMON, Calif. – June 17, 2020 – GE Digital today unveiled the latest updates to its industry-leading Advanced Distribution Management Solutions (ADMS) mission-critical software suite. ADMS provides software for the safe and secure management and orchestration of the distribution grid and delivers reliability, productivity, and efficiency through modular architecture, adaptive algorithms, and predictive analytics for autonomous operations, and an optimized distribution grid.

“Every day, management of the grid becomes more challenging,” said Jim Walsh, GE Digital General Manager, Grid Software. “The distribution network is becoming progressively dynamic, complexity is increasing, and the volume of data that utilities need to understand and integrate continues to grow. Supplying approximately 25% of the world’s global meters served by ADMS, our software supports the full spectrum of utilities – from small to largest – with mission critical, proven operational systems.”

GE Digital ADMS solutions recently achieved the number one leadership position in Navigant Research’s Advanced Distribution Management Solutions (ADMS) Leaderboard report. The Navigant Research Leaderboard ranks nine ADMS vendors based on a spectrum of 10 strategy and execution criteria. Vendors are profiled, rated, and ranked with the goal of providing an objective assessment of their relative strengths and weaknesses in the global ADMS market.

Customers such as PPL Electric Utilities in the United States and UK Power Networks in the United Kingdom are using our ADMS solutions. With this latest update, GE Digital has focused on providing enhancements for Low Voltage Management, automation of Fault Location and Restoration with a Fault Location, Isolation & Service Restoration (FLISR) module, Outage Management and training simulations.

Key developments delivered in these updates include features in the areas of:

Spatial and Connectivity Awareness Across Voltages

Low Voltage Management (LVM) updates deliver improved situational awareness, including visibility of operations and status of low voltage networks, even without fully accurate data. This is particularly relevant in regions with extensive LV networks such as Europe, Africa and Asia. Enhancements provide a new capability for the import of LV networks from a Geographic Information System (GIS) into an existing ADMS system where the medium voltage/high voltage is already being managed in a traditional schematic patch environment. This creates a Network Digital Twin of the entire network, allowing teams from the control room to the field to see how their decisions could impact the wider grid.

i-DE, a Spanish multinational electric utility company, transformed the way it was operating its low voltage network to continue its leadership in clean energy. The company launched an initiative, as part of the UPGRID project*, to address operational efficiency, continue innovation, and focus on customers. Working with GE since 2016, the company goal is to reduce time spent identifying the location of a low voltage incident by 36 minutes. Further, unnecessary trips by restoration crews were reduced by 40%.

Outage Restoration

Fault Location, Isolation & Service Restoration (FLISR) locates outage and recommends remediation or automatically sends sequence of switching actions to isolate the fault and restore power. Updates enable faster plan generation and execution, empowering utilities to be able to report better performance indices (SAIDI, SAIFI, CMIs, etc.) and avoid penalties. Our FLISR solution has also evolved improved awareness of distributed energy resources (DERs) within the distribution grid as well as the ability to act on these resources in concert with traditional grid levers.

Outage Management

Outage Management empowers operators to manage unscheduled and scheduled outages from within a unified operating environment that integrates data and services from real-time SCADA, DMS, and a myriad of corporate systems. Improvements to the user interface and a highly optimized workflow to enable efficient interaction with mobile teams and allows the control center operator to focus on the most critical issues. Tight integration between switch planning and dispatch reduces inadvertent dispatching due to miscommunications, thereby improving safety and reducing O&M costs. Simple, light-weight client access to the real-time operational platform allows remote or distributed resources to participate in the restoration process quickly and efficiently from any location.

Testing & Change Management Simulation

Our operations training simulator provides  an environment to carry out training and testing on a mirror system of the ADMS, representing the behavior and responses of the actual system. Latest developments deliver expanded flexibility for the user—for example, users are able to forecast and examine future events, run specific and specialized simulation scenarios and configure unique conditions.

ADMS solutions are available today from GE Digital. More information on GE Digital’s ADMS can be found here.

*UPGRID project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 646.531.

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