Development of a data warehouse for non-operational data in power utilities

Power engineers are concerned about the operational data, which would enable the real time monitoring, and control of the power system. However the non-operational data retrievable from the system has a potential to reveal useful information regarding the health of the system and infrastructural flaws in the system. The non-operational data consists of records or logs of multiple events such as series of faults, power fluctuations, disturbances and lightning strikes. The paper describes the concept of data warehousing of non-operational data for a power utility. The value of analyzing non-operational data is elaborated. The identification and sources of non-operational data is established and the methods of collecting the data are elaborated. The user groups who would benefit from the non-operational data are identified. The concept of a data warehouse and the steps involved in the implementation are discussed. Finally, the establishment of a functional data path to transfer the SCADA data to the warehouse is discussed in detail and the retrieval of data is also demonstrated