High-Volume Rural Utility Data Collec...

High-Volume Rural Utility Data Collection

Recording the location, dimensions and physical attributes of every piece of equipment constituting rural utilities throughout the United States might seem like a tall order. But information tools used to build geographic information systems (GIS) have advanced so much in recent years that the endeavor is not only possible, but plausible.

Great Falls, Montana-based GeoNav Group International, Inc. is a growing five-year-old company that recently acquired the technology to pull off such an undertaking. Utilizing a high-tech, vehicle-mounted mobile mapping system is making it possible to exponentially improve the efficiency of collecting utility asset data collection.

Erik Potter, vice president and co-founder of GeoNav, knows that the new technology collects data so efficiently that equipping a fleet of trucks with it would make the undertaking easier than one might think. In summer 2010, GeoNav plans on increasing the number of Topcon IP-S2 systems it utilizes from one to four, depending on sales growth. Ultimately, the company will deploy 30–40 systems nationwide.

Growing with Technology

GeoNav was founded in December 2005 by two military veterans: Guner Gardenhire, who had served as a communications technician in the U.S. Air Force; and Erik Potter, who had served as an enlisted submarine navigator in the U.S. Navy. The company began by creating custom data sets for Garmin GPS units that specialized in electric utility and military applications. In 2008, the company was tasked with creating and deploying new technology to better map rural America, resulting in a nationwide mapping initiative backed by the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative(NRTC), which represents the advanced telecommunications and information technology interests of more than 1,400 rural utilities and affiliates in 48 states. The cooperative’s investment in the project was intended to find technology that would make rural utility GIS more affordable and usable for utility engineering and asset mapping.

“We had a little bit of an epiphany one day when we were looking at Google Street View and thought, gosh, if we could get data at a higher resolution out to the utilities and linked into their GIS, that would be powerful,” said Casey Saxton, GeoNav's chief technology officer. A key component of the new data-collection method is high-resolution, ground-level imagery: also GeoNav’s nVIEW 360 manager, Casey Saxton, researched and purchased a high-speed digital camera to capture 360-degree images.

Acknowledging that processing the GIS data is a significant undertaking, Gardiner planned to flag assets in need of repair or replacement in the GIS. “Because you have the ability to configure the database however you want, you can flag whatever you want,” she noted. Multiple utility departments will be able to access the files, Gardiner added. Noble pointed out that providing staking crews with access to a staking package that uses such accurate data offers the potential to yield significant productivity benefits. “If they’re talking to consumers about changing their service or hooking up new service, they can look at the site terrain model while they’re on the phone with the consumer, rather than just trying to remember what the area looks like." Potter added that the ability to capture the terrain in the GIS might save the staking crew a trip to a site in some cases.

A possibility in future outage management is indicating outages on a territory map, Noble surmised. Such a map would indicate to customer service personnel in real time which areas of the territory are being serviced by crews.