Igniting the Spark: Geospatial Technologies for Power Sector

Geospatial technology has wide applications in all utility sectors, including electricity. For an electricity company, the cost of maintaining its most important assets – transmission and distribution facilities – represents a huge portion of its annual operating budgets. Geospatial technology simplifies records management for these key assets of a utility company, thus leading to a decrease in operational costs.  Linking the customer and asset data to a geographic location on a map allows the service providers to look at the bigger picture and thus makes for a powerful decision-making tool.

Besides, the ability of GIS to integrate with other software like ERP or SCADA in an organization makes it an easy to use tool for every utility organization. GIS plays a significant role in power generation, transmission and distribution. GIS is an effective tool that can bind together the various pieces of an electricity distribution system and thus ensure better asset management, improved customer service, improved outage management and more accurate data.  The DMS system from SCADA gives the information on which transformer is off in case of a tripping. Another major advantage is asset management, which can give a reality check of things at ground level.