A smarter Operations Control Centre for energy and utilities

Enrique Bolivar

March 05, 2024

Next-generation Operations Control Centre (OCC) will enable mission-critical communications to improve safety and efficiency.

When it comes to the energy and utilities industry, there is no room for error in day-to-day operations, in either emergency or non-emergency situations.

This is top of mind in the Operations Control Centre, a mission-critical unit responsible for electricity generation, transmission, distribution and service continuity. Monitoring operations and anticipating problems are the main OCC functions. This team is focused on minimising service disruptions, protecting people and assets, and ensuring the day-to-day-operations run smoothly, safely and reliably.

 

However, disruptions to service do occur. Things like human error, extreme weather conditions, physical attacks, capacity constraints, or operational accidents can cause unacceptable service interruptions for end users and lead to resource shortages. In fact, according to a KPMG report, from 2013 and 2020, the number of outage hours in the U.S. doubled to eight per year.

So, when service disruptions happen, the OCC must provide a coordinated response, in a timely manner, to recover from service disruption and minimise the impact on end customer service and global operations.

This is where multimedia communications services can help. In this blog, I will walk through the OCC’s span of responsibilities and the solutions available today that can help them manage this mandate and prepare for the future.

The OCC’s mandate

Protecting technical staff and the public is vital, which energy and utilities organisations must do while managing multiple threats and ensuring service restoration. As an example, imagine a situation where a transformer or transmission tower is on fire. In either case, the station operator or field technician must contact the OCC, who will declare an emergency and immediately initiate an action plan to both de-energise the power line and avoid service disruption.

At the same time, the Operations Control Centre is tasked with maintaining performance, providing quality of service, and keeping operational costs within budget. In non-emergency conditions, these tasks include:

• Scheduling work related to energy generation, transmission, and distribution
• Adding renewable energy sources to the grid
• Coordinating actions after emergency events, such as circuit restoration, customer service, contingency plan design
• Planning preventive maintenance tasks
• Accommodating increases in load demands that may come from adding equipment such as bigger cables or transformers

The role of a smart Operations Control Centre

With this broad and mission-critical mandate, multimedia communications services are crucial to success. A smart Operations Control Centre enables operational effectiveness through a robust telephone system, call taking/dispatch workstation, and collaboration tools that maintain an accurate information flow.

Efficient OCC operations depend on having the right solution in place to coordinate collaborative work between stakeholders, who may represent different business units. A complex ecosystem of solutions converges in the OCC where staff are often challenged to deliver new services that require new applications. This means that everything must be integrated for effective control of operations.

The modules that make up the solution must be open and able to integrate with others. APIs are a key element that enable interconnection of different ecosystem components. With open APIs, operators can create new services, integrate applications, and meet new requirements. APIs also create opportunities for innovation.

Rich and robust communications

Multimedia communications services are vital to an efficient OCC. Without communications, there would be no service as they support the stakeholder interaction and collaboration that minimises recovery times during disruptions.

Therefore, a foundation based on reliable/secure communications is essential to:

• Support complementary services such as call taking/dispatch
• Enable coordination and collaboration between stakeholders
• Improve information awareness
• Offer openness to ease the integration with different functional blocks in the OCC

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise offers a broad communications portfolio that covers telephony services based on the Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX® Enterprise. This portfolio includes the following solutions:

• Visual Notification Assistant (VNA) for incident and emergency management
• Voice recording to monitor, record and analyse all OCC interactions
• Dispatch Console to deal with high volumes of call taking/dispatching and enhance collaboration
• Remote Visual Assistance (RVA) to streamline on-site interventions by improving interactions between field workers and OCC experts

Openness to the ecosystem

These communications services are integrated and interconnected with OCC functional blocks (such as radio and video surveillance systems) through standard protocols and APIs. Additionally, the Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Open Gateway – a dedicated API server – increases integration capabilities, providing a set of RESTful APIs to host ALE and customer applications such as:

• Telephony services
• Management capabilities
• Analytics

Real-time collaboration

Collaboration is vital for OCC task coordination and information awareness. Integrating business processes and communications solutions is key to enabling efficient operations. The Rainbow™ by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise CPaaS solution integrates with the customer environment to provide communications services such as chat, file sharing, voice and video over any device. At the same time, Rainbow leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI), chatbots, system databases and analytics to automate and simplify operational processes and create new services.

The evolution to a collaborative operational environment is the next step for many OCCs. Integrating different functional blocks is the key driver to enable interaction between the stakeholders, increased communications, improved situational awareness, and enhanced decision-making.

What’s next for the Operations Control Centre?

According to a KPMG report, 73% of energy and utilities companies in 2020 viewed an increase of automation across their operations as a strong priority. A next generation OCC must be prepared to support more automated operations and embrace technology innovation.

Digital transformation is at the heart of the next generation OCC. Integration of new components will add value to complex OCC environments, moving them from standardised operations to predictive capabilities, process automation and seamless collaboration between stakeholders.

This evolution is based on three main pillars:

1. SIP technology at the core of the communications solution to support/deliver advanced telephony features and pave the way for a smooth migration to the next generation

2. A cloud platform to connect to the OCC. WebRTC services provide borderless communications and collaboration between customers and employees through integration with mobile apps and multimedia self-service interfaces, and commercial apps using the Rainbow connector

3. Hybrid private/public cloud solutions to deliver new services and increase reliability

The evolution to next generation OCC for energy and utilities companies offers significant benefits, including:

• Implementation of a fast recovery plan through a highly resilient infrastructure
• Enriched OCC interaction by connecting IoT and AI solutions to automate processes and enable predictive capabilities to reduce threats and improve recovery times
• Enhanced contextual information that qualifies incidents, improves efficiency, and empowers the staff to collaborate and make decisions

A smarter Operations Control Centre

Multimedia communications services are the cornerstone of an efficient OCC, supporting interaction and collaboration between the various stakeholders in the OCC to avoid incidents, accelerate responses to service disruptions and ensure safety for all.