Society depends on reliable utility services to ensure the health and safety of our communities. Electrical grid failures have impact and consequences that can range from daily inconveniences to catastrophic events. Ensuring grid reliability means that data is fully leveraged to understand and forecast demand, predict and mitigate unplanned interruptions to power supply, and efficiently restore power when needed. Neudesic, a Systems Integrator, and DTE Energy, a large electric and natural gas utility serving 2.2 million customers in southeast Michigan, partnered to use large IoT datasets to identify the sources and causes of reliability issues across DTE’s power distribution network. In this session, we will demonstrate how we ingest hundreds of millions of quality measures each day from DTE’s network of smart electric meters. This data is then further processed in Databricks to detect anomalies, apply graph analytics and spatially cluster these anomalies into “hot spots”. Engineers and Work Management Experts use a dashboard to explore, plan and prioritize diverse actions to remediate the hot spots. This allows DTE to prioritize work orders and dispatch crews based on impact to grid reliability. Because of this and other efforts, DTE has improved reliability by 25% year over year. We will demonstrate our notebooks and machine learning models along with our dashboard. We will also discuss Spark streaming, Pandas UDF’s, anomaly detection and DBSCAN clustering. By the end of our presentation, you should understand our approach to infer hidden insights from our IoT data, and potentially apply similar techniques to your own data.

1. Improving Power Grid Reliability
Using IoT Analytics
Jim Brown
Director of Data Science at Neudesic
Minjie Yu
Senior Data Scientist at DTE

2. Agenda
§ Company introductions
§ Business challenges
§ Solution architecture
§ Demonstration

3. Help clients land on the winning side of digital transformation
OUR MISSION
20 Year old consulting and services firm
24x7 Delivery across the US & globe
14X Microsoft partner of the year award winner
10 years of utilities consulting experience
4 Utility modernization design centers

4. Help clients land on the winning side of digital transformation
OUR MISSION
OUR STRATEGIC AND TECHNICAL OFFERINGS
• Data & AI
• Cloud Infrastructure, Migration and Strategy
• Custom Application Development
• Hyper Automation
• Continuous Delivery and DevOps
• CRM and Modern Workplace
• Integration & API Management
• Business Transformation & Strategy
• Managed Services

5. DTE Energy Overview
• Headquartered in Detroit, MI
• DTE Electric
– Electric generation and distribution
– 31,000 miles of overhead and 16,400
miles of underground sub-transmission
and distribution lines
– 2.2 million customers
– 11,084 megawatt (MW) system capacity
• DTE Gas
– Natural gas transmission , storage and
distribution
– 19,000 miles of distribution
– 1.2 million customers
• Gas Storage & Pipelines
• Power & Industrial Projects
• Energy Trading
Service territory ~7,600 square miles

6. Leading the Way to a Cleaner, Safer and Smarter Energy Future
At DTE Energy our aspiration is to be the best-operated energy company in North
America and a force for growth and prosperity in the communities where we live and
serve.

7. Business Challenges
▪ Mostly based on long duration power outages, which do not
take into account momentary interruptions or voltage
exceptions
▪ Generally using averages of certain KPIs in past 3 to 5 years,
which overlooks time distribution of reliability problems
▪ Analyzed at high level of the system without specific areas or
sections of a circuit
▪ Lacking information of outage causes or affected assets due to
data quality issues or disparate IT systems
▪ Takes a holistic approach with advanced modeling method
and with inputs of relevant types of data
▪ Provides engineers with specific and meaningful information
such as sections of a circuit, severity of reliability problems,
affected assets, root causes of outages
▪ Reduces cycle time and cost on major reliability programs
through accurate information, visualization and specific
recommendations
▪ Enables the organization to become more agile and proactive
to address customer concerns about power quality
▪ Establishes a framework and foundation for future investment
strategy studies
Business values
Challenges in current strategies

8. Asset Health Management
Aging equipment is another main cause of service quality issues.
Reinforcing or upgrading assets that are critical to system reliability
significantly reduces outages.
Tree Maintenance
Fallen trees are responsible for nearly 70 percent of the time our customers spend
without power. That’s why we’re stepping up efforts to trim overgrown trees to keep you
safe, and the energy grid reliable. With tree trimming, customers experience 60 percent
fewer outages.

9. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)
• 2.6 million AMI electric meters
Report usage on 15-min/Hourly intervals
• Service Quality
Outage start and end information
§ Momentary outages when less than 5 minutes
§ Sustained outages are 5 minutes or longer
Outage and voltage alarms in real time
Voltage events when above or below thresholds
Voltage readings on 5-min intervals
Smart Meters are Internet of Things (IoT) devices that monitor usage and service quality

10. NetworkX Connectivity Graph
Equipment chain and hierarchy of distribution system (distance metric)

11. Insights are hidden beneath so much data...

12. Solution Architecture
Simplified diagram of the processes to identify hot spots and suspect devices

13. Demonstration

14. Example
Potential Cause
Model Run Date Hotspot ID Suspect Source Tree Equipment Other
4/22/2021 1 Overhead Circuit 19.9% 19.9% 0%
4/22/2021 1 Recloser 10.5% 0% 19.9%
4/22/2021 1 Overhead Switch 19.9% 0% 0%

15. Feedback
Your feedback is important to us.
Don’t forget to rate and review the sessions.