The concept of a publicly owned utility is a unique and important model in the American utility environment. Formed by local residents exercising their basic franchising authority to provide essential services to their community, publicly owned utilities—or public power systems—have worked together to fulfill a community's energy needs and to improve quality of life.

Colorado Springs Utilities (CSU) is an example of such a utility. It is one of very few in the nation that, along with electricity, also provides water, wastewater, and natural gas services to its members. Founded in 1924, CSU serves a population of approximately 570,000 in the Pikes Peak region. Generating 82 percent of its own electricity, its electric distribution service area encompasses 470 square miles around the Colorado Springs area and consumes more than four million megawatt hours annually.

"As a community-owned utility, we try to move quickly and efficiently to reduce the prices our customers pay whenever we can," says Randy Scott, Colorado Springs Utilities GIS supervisor. "Changes in technology and government policies are pushing electric utilities to become more competitive and to evolve into faster-paced, more innovative businesses. We are continually looking for new ways to increase customer service and value, thus upgrading the GIS was a major goal."

A major benefit of being a community-owned utility is that it can help keep rates competitive, on average 15 percent lower than those of for-profit utilities, by reinvesting revenues back into the operation. Thus, committed to maintaining its competitive edge, CSU was one of the first utilities to select ArcInfo and deploy it in a UNIX environment. It maintained its electric data using Miner & Miner's (M&M) (Fort Collins, Colorado) utility GIS application, MMPowerTools.

In September 2001, seeking to upgrade its GIS system and achieve greater cost savings, CSU made the decision to migrate to Esri/M&M's ArcGIS/ArcFM 8 technology. CSU sought to form a basis for migrating and integrating the maintenance of its wide area communications, gas, water, and wastewater GIS data to the most current GIS software. Interfacing to its Outage Management System with GIS was also a goal. CSU required a fully supported GIS solution that would consolidate its disparate systems on a unified platform and provide the ability to share information across the organization, improving data maintenance, map production, and other business requirements.

Meeting CSU's Business Requirements

A key goal for CSU's migration was to create a more responsive workforce, a group of editors who could edit and maintain the multiple utilities within the organization. CSU currently has a staff of 11 editors maintaining its GIS data, with all of its approximately 2,000 employees having view, query, and map plotting access. The first major editing task in the electric migration project was to replace simple point feature switch cabinets with complex switch cabinet features that contain the internal connected components. This effort was needed to improve the content and quality of the GIS data and provide for more intelligent tracing and switching functionality. This task permitted CSU to have a more accurate representation of its electrical system so it could be used for a variety of analysis tasks.

"This new environment facilitates our ability to meet and exceed our three-day turnaround on the mapping of our energized system," states Scott.

The ArcFM Feeder Management tool allows the utility's users to maintain accurate Feeder IDs on all devices connected in the electric distribution system. System Favorites allows users to place complex switch cabinets quickly and with great accuracy. Conduit Manager allows CSU to place, manage, and trace its complex system of underground facilities.

Rapid Implementation Plan

The migration of CSU's electric data was completed in just over six months using a phased implementation approach. Because ArcFM and ArcGIS were developed using technology based on industry standards, CSU was able to complete a straightforward implementation of its GIS, yet the open architecture of the solution has enabled it to make customizations to better suit its business processes.

For more information, contact Osnat (Osi) Arbel, Miner & Miner, Consulting Engineers, Inc. (e-mail: osi.arbel@miner.com), or Tom Taber, project manager (e-mail: tom.taber@miner.com), or visit www.miner.com.