Data integration/exchange - Part 1: existing technical and business opportunities

The deregulation of the electric utility industry combined with development of advanced technology has raised many questions as how to make the power system operation more cost effective while preserving a high level of reliability and security. The utilities are developing different strategies for achieving this goal, enabling them to stay competitive. Many other new businesses are being formed to take advantage of the new opportunities in the marketplace.This article provides an overview of the possible new technical and business opportunities and benefits in developing advanced strategies for data integration and information exchange. It describes the efforts to discover new approaches to formulating a successful business strategy that would ensure competitiveness, with particular focus on the role of data integration and information exchange in developing new technical and business opportunities in the deregulated market place. In order to put the above discussion into better perspective, two new applications, namely a comprehensive fault and disturbance analysis and a novel two-stage state estimation, are presented as illustrative examples of how additional benefits can be obtained through assigning new business value to information and data.