Peninsula Light Company had an ambitious goal to move from the fourth quartile of reliability to the first quartile, as compared to all U.S. utilities.
The Challenge
Peninsula Light Company sought a robust ADMS platform to facilitate the deployment of integrated applications in an evolutionary fashion as utility needs changed. The utility planned to begin upgrades with an integrated status and control system and then to deploy FLISR, before considering additional ADMS applications. Importantly, the utility wanted a vendor that was willing to collaborate in the development of additional features and capabilities.
Of paramount importance: an ADMS that would enable the utility to validate the accuracy of configuration changes and GIS data imports (which had become increasingly inaccurate over time) offline before being pushed into production.
The Solution
Since working with Survalent and commissioning a tri-redundant ADMS and new OT infrastructure and architecture, the Peninsula Light Company has seen little to no unplanned downtime, even under stress. The utility has also realized cost and operational savings through the implementation of the SurvalentONE ADMS.
Peninsula Light Company estimates that approximately 80% of a full-time employee’s time was spent managing the previous SCADA system through crashes, restarts, and ticket management. The robustness of the new ADMS freed up that time for system planning, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) deployment, and mobile workforce management tools, which added to productivity and efficiency improvements. The IED and control panel templates also saved countless hours when deploying new reclosers, as compared to the previous SCADA system and field-based RTUs, which required manual configuration of every point.
Peninsula Light Co. is the second-largest member-owned cooperative in the Northwest United States. It services 32,000 residential and business electric consumers in Western Pierce County, WA.
