Alan Saunders, a Senior Industry Manager for the Utilities Division of Autodesk, discusses how the tools for utility design have evolved over the years and the different design challenges that are currently facing the utility sector.

Full Transcript:

Ben Lack: All right, we’re with Alan Saunders from Autodesk. Thanks a lot for being with us today.
Alan Saunders: It’s my pleasure.
Ben Lack: Can you give us a little bit of background on who Autodesk is and what you guys do.
Alan Saunders: Sure. Autodesk is primarily a design company. We’re here at DistribuTECH show, the utility show, because utilities are really all about assets and infrastructure; and the planning, design, and management of those assets and infrastructures. That’s where we can really help them out with our engineering design tools.
Ben Lack: So your consultancy provides software–
Alan Saunders: We provide software. We provide software solutions that really help them in a business process, planning, designing, and managing their asset life cycle.
Ben Lack: Over the last ten or twenty years, what types of evolutions and design that you guys have seen that you’re now recommending your clients with the software instead of recommending with—
Alan Saunders: Right. Well, over the last ten or twenty years really, if you want to go back that far and I can because I’ve been in the utility business that long, utilities have really moved from doing a lot of these processes in paper: really drawing out a transition or a distribution network on a piece of paper and keeping that information in a file cabinet. Towards today, it’s, well, from paper they went to 2D and today they’re really moving towards three dimensional real world type of representations of those utility assets. Along with that, keeping that information digitally in a way that they can access it really across the organization and across the life cycle of the asset. So, we’re going from very manual processes to very digital and really building the integration between a variety of the business systems.
Ben Lack: And are you seeing that certain design features being integrated in the designs of today compared to the past?
Alan Saunders: Well, certainly the design today, planning and design today is much more about sustainability. One area where our customers are very interested in progressing their design is sort of the upfront planning of the project. So, if they’re going to put a new power line, they want to know what property is crossing? What’s the least environmentally impactful place to put it? What sorts of permitting are they going to have to do? How can they share information about the design with their constituents before the project is built so they can get better acceptance from the public and others who were involved? So, it’s really having been able to take that design and representing in a way that the public can understand it.
Ben Lack: How are you customers balancing the advantages of certain design characteristics, or principles to the cost of actually implementing those strategies?
Alan Saunders: Well, utilities look, I think, at the life cycle cost of an asset. They’re going to balance off that initial design cost versus how much the asset is going to cost them over the life cycle. So, they’re really looking at how to make that asset the most sustainable that they can. It’s not lowest installation cost because you have to make sure it’s a critical asset, you have to make sure that the power is going to stay on, the water is going to stay flowing, and that sort of thing. They really look at it in the end.
Ben Lack: And how has the software evolved over time?
Alan Saunders: Right. In a lot of ways. As I mentioned earlier, that transition from manual processes and paper to 2D to 3D. So, we’re certainly providing tools and allow utilities and other customers and other industries the ability to start to do those plans and designs in 3D, certainly. But the other thing that we’ve done over time is build more and more intelligence in the software. What I mean by intelligence is the utility standards are built in to the software. So, when I’m drawing out a distribution facility and the transformer that goes on the pull, I want to be able to look into what’s that going to be connected to, what size transformer I need. So we build standards like that into the software to help guide the designers through that process.
Ben Lack: Because I imagine that depending on where you are in the country, where you are in the world, they’re going to have different types of rules and laws and regulations that you’re going to have to be accustomed to.
Alan Saunders: Absolutely. Right. Those can be, like you said, it can be different country specific, but even within a country there are different weather conditions so you obviously if you’re putting up a distribution mine in North Dakota, you have to deal with wind and weather issues that you don’t in some other parts of the country.  That’s a really important thing for our customers.
Ben Lack: Geography as well based on where you are.
Alan Saunders: Terrain and geography is critically important as well.
Ben Lack: So the intelligence is to make sure the messages come through. Intelligence is really aggregating all these new variables that are maybe more considered in the past and bringing these more to light do that the design is more effective and efficient.
Alan Saunders: Absolutely. We provide a lot of those standards really out of the box in the software, but we’re also deliberating configurable environments so the utility can incorporate their own standards into that. And that’s really important, too, because there are things happening right now in the utility industry. It’s really a transition of the work force so the people that are doing this work forever have been doing it for thirty five, forty years and for that designer or that engineer, maybe you don’t need that really breadth and depth of standards built in the software but for the new designer that’s coming in, who’s never done this work before, they want to be able to bring them up to speed more quickly. They want to provide them with the standards-based environment so that they can make sure that others is basically doing a very similar design. One of the things we asked at the show today as one of our customers saw the California Edison has gone live with a solution for 600 or so of their distribution designers and big driver for them was that change in work force: bringing in new people and enabling them to be up the speed and more proficient much more quickly. We talked a little bit about renewable energy. One of our customers in Germany, it’s a very small utility, get 40% of their energy from renewable sources. So, they do photovoltaics on people’s roofs, biomass facilities; and they were having a big problem just in permitting those new facilities. As a homeowner, you go on to the utilities counter and say you want to put photovoltaics on your roof and that process for them to locate the existing information on what they had on the field, where you are going to connect, how does it impact the network, it would take them four to six weeks to work through that process. So, this utility has digitized all the information, created a digital model of their network, and now somebody comes in and they can answer questions like that really over the counter. Anybody in the utility can access any information and be able to provide the customer the information they need to put the photovoltaic in a manner of a half hour rather than several weeks. That’s another great example of how these technologies is used and how they provide support.
Ben Lack: You actually mentioned earlier, which I want to go back to, about the relationship with electric vehicles and how utilities are trying to overcome this additional technological response or demand rather. How are you guys tackling that issue? That’s something that’s pretty new because it’s such an emerging technology. What are the recommendations that you or the software give or what high level strategies are you giving to really make sure these utilities are building correctly?
Alan Saunders: Yes. It’s an issue because typically the utility we’re looking at certain neighborhoods where these vehicles are going to be concentrated, at least initially, whether they are upscale neighborhood or neighborhoods that are particularly environmentally conscious. They’re working on their plans from where they expect to see concentrations about the electric vehicles. But, when you think about plugging in electric vehicles for charging, it’s really the equivalent of a medium to large size home, and you’re plugging in this instantaneous basis. So, the utility has to look at the existing infrastructure that’s in place and one of the ways they do that with our design software, they can do the calculation, do the engineering to make sure that the facilities that they have in place now are adequate to meet the load that’s going to be coming in because of the electric vehicle. So, that type of analysis is starting the design the process but it’s also done with existing equipment in the field.
Ben Lack: Share with me why this field is so interesting to you and why you’re in the business that you’re in.
Alan Saunders: Sure, sure. Well, I’ve been in this business for thirty years, and as I mentioned earlier, I saw the transition that’s happening in the market. Right now, the utility business as we look around the floor, there’s so much going on whether it’s renewable energy, electric vehicles, smart grids. Really, each of those impacts the way a utility does their designs. Somebody goes out and buys an electric vehicle and must have plug it in in their garage, you have to go through a process where the utility make sure that the local equipment is sized to fit that load. And that’s really, a lot of people wouldn’t think about it that way, but it’s also a design problem. So, somebody in the utility has to make that precision. Just the breadth of things going on in the industry right now around sustainability and environmental issues; and combining that with what’s happening in design and design software; and being able to bring in reality captured data, information on we’re taking on field and bring that in to the design process; and model it in a three dimensional type of ways, it’s really exciting and makes it great place to be in right now.

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