Utility customers have become more sophisticated and demanding of the services being provided in the new digital landscape. Utilities are now challenged with providing more benefits and interaction with customers without sacrificing traditional safe, secure, and reliable service.
RINA North America understands our client’s core business drivers and how to apply new methods using technology to address the changing utility landscape.
Our team of experts understands the challenges of modernizing aging infrastructure to support an increasing demand to improve customer experience and sustainable power.
Our ability to respond quickly with innovative, budget-sensitive solutions with consistent quality is the key to maintaining the level of service clients have come to expect.
- Consulting and Advisory Services
- Federal Grant Assistance
- Business Case Modeling and Rate Case Analysis
- Program Management and Project Controls
- Substation and Distribution Design
- SCADA Commissioning (check other categories for this)
- Renewables and Distributed Generation
- Reliability Planning, Grid Hardening and Resiliency
- Smart Grid and Smart City Planning, Monitoring and Communication
- Outage Event Management
- Data Collection and Asset Management
- Geotechnical, Environmental and Permitting
- Aerial Surveys
- T&D and Substation Next Gen Inspections
- Business Intelligence and Data Analytics
- Geospatial Services
- Organizational Change Management (OCM)
Electric utilities require regulatory approval before committing large expenditures to deploy smart grid technologies like advanced metering infrastructure, distribution automation, volt-VAR optimization, and many others.
Regulatory approval is necessary because these expenditures are often covered or 'paid for' by increases in retail electric rates paid by customers.
In this project, we provided a variety of support services to assist a Midwest Utility with its regulatory strategy, including the development of robust and detailed business cases, analysis, and other supporting studies to convince regulators (and intervenors). Smart grid expenditures are in the public interest because the benefits realized by customers delivered by these technologies exceed their costs.
As part of our deployment of advanced meter infrastructure (AMI) technology for a Midwest Utility, the client indicated the desire for a platform where information and photos could be permanently captured for each new AMI meter installed by two separate third-party installation contractors.
We developed the Artemis platform and imported the data from the contractor’s transactional workflow systems so that the client had a permanent record of these activities.
Benefits of this application included detailed information and photographic documentation for over 800,000 meters installed by third-party contractors. Information was used to verify completion of meter installations, respond to claims raised by customers after the installation, and troubleshoot problems that could occur in the future.
Site captures included all the data related to each meter installation and a full set of pre-install/install/post-install photos.
We provided thought leadership, project management, and business process services to assist the client in addressing a critical resource constraint.
The result was a test lab that brought work previously performed in the field into a lab environment that provided a large efficiency gain for the project's critical path.
Additional benefits included safety and training benefits that would have been decidedly more difficult to realize in the field.
The client was so pleased with the results that a second lab was built shortly thereafter.
We deployed multiple projects with energy storage as a means to improve resiliency in the distribution grid. This included installations of microgrids in collaboration with critical customers to serve as an island during system events and larger 1-3 MWh systems in rural circuits as an alternate source for hard-to-reach communities.
We provided consulting services to help with the overall integration of the systems in to the to the distribution grid safely, and managed the data generated by the systems to shape how these technologies will integrate with the grid in the future.
A large utility company complemented their intelligent line sensors installation and deployment project with an organizational change management plan.
We change consultants identified a schedule that brought teams in "just in time" instead of saturating employees with information way before their scope of work began.
Change consultants created consistent messaging and a central hub for training documentation, in addition to identifying gaps in how training had been stored for previous work.
Change consultants documented resistance heard from field teams and incorporated answers to their concerns in project status meetings allowing for smoother implementation and adoption.
