To meet the growing demands of communities, businesses, power-hungry data centers and more, utilities are increasingly incorporating intelligent design for electric grid enhancement. While a recent IBM study has found that utilities are directing an average 9.8% of their revenue toward grid improvements, some 21% of respondents say their firms have made little to no progress. For these utilities and others, intelligent design for grid enhancement and improvement offers powerful technology that can bring their initiatives to market quicker, more efficiently, and with improved quality and safety.
In this article, GAI grid resiliency professionals Stephen Anthony, Sam Bouvier, and Nate Dwelley discuss their experience with intelligent design tools and how utilizing this powerful technology enables utilities to build sustainable grid solutions that can reliably deliver uninterrupted service to their customers.
Featured GAI Professionals
Stephen Anthony, PE, MS has over 20 years of experience specializing in managing power-delivery engineering projects, from distribution pole replacement to large, intricate, multi-year substation expansions.
Sam Bouvier, PE leads a team dedicated to delivering innovative and reliable solutions for power transmission and distribution facilities across the country. Sam brings extensive experience in utility projects and a deep understanding of relevant industry standards, including those from NESC, NERC, RUS, and regional directives such as California’s GO-95.
Nate Dwelley specializes in substation physical design and implementation utilizing advanced Building Information Modeling (BIM) design tools. With nearly 20 years of experience, Nate has worked on substation facilities ranging from 12 kV-500 kV, including acting as lead designer on major substation initiatives.
Q: Tell us about your personal experience using intelligent design for electric grid enhancement and improvement.
Nate Dwelley: Intelligent design software has been a vital component of my personal toolkit for nearly 20 years. I’ve been a member of the Substation Design Solutions Industry Consortium (SDSIC) for at least 10 years and currently serve as co-chair of the organization’s Physical Committee. This committee helps develop industry standards, guidelines, and tools, and works to advance the design and implementation of high-performing physical substation layouts.
Sam Bouvier: In addition to using these tools over many years in my daily assignments and when working with my team, my group and I both contribute to and participate in the PLS CADD Advanced Training and User Group Meeting, which is presented by Power Line Systems. This is an annual event where those skilled in PLS CADD technology gather to network, participate in training modules, explore the software’s advanced features, share best practices, discuss industry trends, network, and more.
Stephen Anthony: We consider GAI’s electric grid resiliency team to be thought leaders in the use of intelligent design for electric grid enhancement.
We know that the intelligent design landscape is continually evolving—and as we actively integrate these advanced tools into our design work, we stay at the forefront of innovation by participating in industry events and organizations like those Nate and Sam described. We invest in helping GAI professionals maintain engagement with their industry peers, contribute to industry-wide change, and position ourselves to continually track emerging technologies to better serve our clients.
Q: How would you describe where things sit currently with regard to the use of modern intelligent design tools for electric grid enhancement and improvement?
Stephen: Utilities are incorporating these tools more and more, and in my view, we are approaching an inflection point that reminds me of when designers and the industry moved from hand drafting to computer-assisted drafting. Like that previous move to new technology, utilities’ incorporation of intelligent design tools for electric grid enhancement and improvement is a transformative moment with substantial added value for the industry and this area of work.
Nate: In terms of substation design, the utility industry has significantly increased its adoption of intelligent design technologies over the last five years. We are seeing the industry move to Autodesk design platforms including AutoCAD and Inventor, as well as industry-specific tools from Spatial Business Systems (SBS) and Primtech. There are industry rumblings of attempting a transition to Revit, which is an extremely powerful Building Information Modeling (BIM) design tool GAI currently uses for mechanical and building design that can significantly improve design efficiency and quality.
Sam: As utilities bring on new staff who are more familiar with these and other intelligent design software, they start to embrace the software and their capabilities more and more. As this progresses, I believe that design quality will improve, grid infrastructure will become more reliable, and the designs will be produced more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Q: Can you expand on some of the advantages of intelligent design tools for electric grid enhancement?
Stephen: Intelligent design tools improve efficiency, helping us to optimize our design time and reduce or possibly eliminate repetitive tasks while the client benefits in terms of quicker time-to-market for their initiatives.
Intelligent design tools that incorporate Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology help designers and clients assess the grid’s status and target areas for improvement while helping guide that effort with critical data like demand forecasts, environmental factors, and outage history. Many draw upon an information-rich backend that helps improve design accuracy by referring to a single, consistent data source to help mitigate human error in drafting.
Newer design software improves collaboration through workflows that enable approaching design as a team task versus older software with which design was chiefly a one-person effort.
And then there’s improved visualization and safety enabled by software that can perform 3D modeling and rendering akin to a digital twin. Nate can model a brand-new substation in a 3D space, and in the realm of transmission line design, Sam and his team can create images of transmission poles dotting across the landscape, which can improve cross-discipline coordination and from a client perspective helps visualize what these infrastructure projects are actually going to look like.
Sam: PLS-CADD design software brings the many facets of power-line design together into a single program to help boost efficiencies and reduce design delivery time. Software like SPIDAcalc and PoleForeman improve transmission and distribution designing efficiency by enabling fast, reliable, and cost-effective single-pole or single-span analysis. As mentioned, PLS-CADD allows us to visually model transmission lines, making it easier to communicate design concepts to landowners and the community in a clear and compelling way.
Among the many capabilities within PLS-CADD is the option of creating a standard library of your transmission/distribution poles and the assemblies for your poles. Using this data, the software enables almost instantaneous pole-design capability—and it can generate a bill of materials for each assembly, making it as simple as a click of a button to render a bill of materials for an entire transmission line.
Nate: From the physical design for substations side, the asset materials and design metadata that intelligent design technologies can draw from provides a single source of truth for drafting work— enabling quicker, more accurate designs by creating a master model that can incorporate changes throughout a given design with just a few mouse clicks and minor drafting changes.
Like Stephen referenced earlier, design work no longer needs to be someone sitting at a monitor copying and pasting changes through 15 different section cuts: everything draws from that master model. This capability significantly boosts speed, quality, and consistency in substation designs.
Intelligent design for electric grid enhancement also includes tools that automate the Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) process for both Protections and Controls (P&C) and substation physical design. This capability enables a user to follow a cable through the P&C design to visualize if it’s wired up correctly and provides a direct report of where an error is if one exists. Designers will be able to run an electrical clearance check on their 3D model to see if the real-world configuration will run into a clearance issue, and if so, where it is and what piece of equipment and or structure is impacted by it.
Q: What value does working with GAI for grid enhancement and improvement initiatives offer clients?
Nate: We have a wide range of inter-discipline and cross-discipline support throughout the company whether that be environmental or infrastructure and civil engineering, as well as comprehensive support for aspects of power delivery ranging from generation to home delivery.
Stephen: Beyond a commitment to outstanding customer service, we understand how important it is to earn trust. Clients quickly understand that we want to be part of their team, share their vision, and deliver results that meet or exceed their expectations. Most of GAI’s business is for repeat clients, and we’ve been doing work for some clients for 30-40 years. Additionally, GAI clients benefit from our company being large enough to deliver the many capabilities needed to successfully implement a client’s design project, but we’re not so large that any client becomes just a number—we don’t take you for granted.
Nate: With every incorporation of newer technology, we help move utilities toward a future where they are better empowered to keep pace with the electrification, data center rollout, and energy needs of industry and the public—a place where we can design and engineer sites and lines within the expedited schedules that we see now on a day-to-day basis.
Contact Stephen Anthony, PE, MS, 412.399.5364, Sam Bouvier, PE, 346.231.7182, or Nate Dwelley, 816.256.2112, for more information about GAI’s electric grid enhancement and resiliency support, part of the comprehensive range of GAI’s engineering, environmental, and cultural resources services for power and energy projects.