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The purpose of my map is to illustrate
substation and feeder load during Rochester Public Utilities (RPU) peak load
for 2011. Peak load is when energy usage
is at a maximum for the year. This information can be useful to engineers when
considering infrastructure upgrades or to managers to better conceptualize load
tends and usage. Utilities try to
forecast their load in order to more efficiently and effectively buy and sell
their energy to neighboring municipals as well as determining infrastructure
needs and load requirements of generators and turbines. Representing customer
data information would be valuable to a marketing team as well.
Most of the data was obtained from the
city of Rochester Public Utilities GIS department. Substation information was manually entered
from SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system logs. Electrical feeder data was obtained from
RPU’s engineering team. I also obtained
customer electric data from RPU’s marketing and metering teams but due to time
constraints the projects scope had to be shortened.
The maps scale was set to the city
limits of Rochester. Due to crowded
infrastructure I found it necessary to include an additional data layer to
better illustrate load usage in a very congested area of the map. The maps projection was set to lambert
conformal conic. Standard parallels
are set to 43.8 and 44.1 degrees north for viewing Olmsted County.
If
I had more time on this project I would like to represent all of RPU’s customers data with a dot
density map. I would like to see if
there were any trends that became apparent, perhaps by filtering down to the
top 25% heaviest electric users and finding clusters of dense usage. I would also like to create this map again
for data from 2009, 2010 and 2012 since there is SCADA data available and
possibly a trend would form over the course of those years.