SYSTEM PLANNING

LOAD FORECASTING - Develop and refine forecasts of weather-normalized transformer and feeder loading using spatial land-use, regression and urban redevelopment models. Help institute sound load forecasting processes.

SYSTEM PLANNING - Develop and justify medium and long-range plans that satisfy load growth, system reliability, system operation efficiency, and other strategic considerations in the most cost-effective manner. Ensure that money spent today would have long-lasting values and align with the long-term strategic direction of the utility.

PLANNING CRITERIA DEVELOPMENT - Review, benchmark and update the utility's planning criteria to reflect best industry practices, emerging energy delivery and energy demand management technologies, and new analytic tools.

CAPITAL BUDGET REVIEW - Validate the reasonableness of capital project scopes, cost and benefit estimates to ensure that they are accurate and defendable. Verify adequate consideration of plausible alternatives.

RELIABILITY PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT

PREDICTIVE RELIABILITY MODELING - Develop and tune system models against actual system reliability characteristics and perform reliability studies using popular applications like SynerGEE, Cymdist and WindMil.

RELIABILITY AND POWER QUALITY ASSESSMENT - Strengthen utility management and regulatory reporting with appropriate data collection and application of power quality (such as harmonics measurements) and reliability indices (such as SAIFI, SAIDI and CAIDI). Support benchmarking, root-cause analysis and data mining.

RELIABILITY ROADMAP - Develop a roadmap to justify reliability spending and obtain dramatic reliability improvements by clearly defining the desired future state, assessing the current state, and formulating a well-coordinated plan, which identifies near-term improvements as well as long-term goals with clearly defined metrics and milestones.

MANAGEMENT & REGULATORY SUPPORT

PROJECT PORTFOLIO OPTIMIZATION - Optimize project portfolios using a robust and proven approach to ensure proper ranking and selection of projects, eliminating "gold plating" and enabling appropriate project deferrals. Avoid the pitfalls of simple benefit-to-cost ranking that commonly fails due to excessive blanket budgets, inappropriate project classifications, tunnel vision on single-year budgets, and inadequate considerations of potential risks

REGULATORY SUPPORT - Provide independent, expert written and oral testimonies in support of rate cases, infrastructure upgrade and reliability improvement projects, reliability audits and storm assessments, etc. Help respond to intervener and regulatory staff rebuttals.