How Utility and Transmission Companies Successfully Tackle Building Challenges with Tech

With the shift toward renewable sources of energy, the industry faces a need to reduce grid-level inefficiencies. Renewable energy generation is more susceptible to daily and seasonal variation. That, in turn, requires a greater interchange between the main physical systems in the U.S.

For utility companies and civil and infrastructure builders alike, these pressures create both an opportunity and a challenge. They must meet market needs and satisfy investors while at the same time running tight operations to deliver on commitments.

Here are a few imperatives for utility builders to help meet those demands and create opportunities:

Extensive planning and coordination across stakeholders. A typical project involves utility companies, landowners, government agencies, and environmental organizations.
Communication across dispersed teams. Projects can span miles, cutting across states and jurisdictions. Having location intelligence around project data and the ability to keep teams in sync is imperative.
Clear paper trails. Builders need ironclad documentation starting all the way from preconstruction across construction and post-construction to show compliance with regulatory requirements and document changes and approvals.
High standards for quality and safety. With labor turnover and the demand for training teams at new locations, relying on institutional knowledge doesn’t work. Standards need to be documented and monitored, especially when new construction processes or sensitive environmental assessments and permits are involved.

That’s where a construction management solution can help. ��Ǵ�� works with utility builders, large and small, to work more efficiently. Here are some of the ways ��Ǵ�� can help:

Providing a Single Source of Truth for All Projects

��Ǵ�� centralizes and streamlines the management of permits and regulatory compliance documents. This enables teams to easily track application statuses, submission deadlines, and regulatory updates so that builders can navigate complex regulatory processes more efficiently.

“��Ǵ�� helps us improve document management and control by centralizing all the data…Centralizing all of those files really increases the ability for us to find what we’re looking for. It cuts down the time people spend looking for things, and we no longer have to play a guessing game where things are,” explained Alexis Capozzi, VP of Construction Management at Vanguard Energy Partners.

On federal government projects, ��Ǵ�� can also serve as a clearinghouse for material that has already been vetted for public consumption release. While it can be difficult for government projects to flow through some platforms, ��Ǵ�� provides ease of use, needed privacy, and a single source of truth for all stakeholders.

“From a document management standpoint, ��Ǵ�� has always been very useful with our federal partners…the government has a lot of cyber security and firewalls in place, so it can be difficult to pass documents back and forth. You’ve got to have a central repository for all this information – and they’re always able to use ��Ǵ��,” explained Terri Stubblefield, Senior Commercial Contract Manager at Duke Energy Source.

Duke Energy also uses ��Ǵ�� to keep track of the questions and responses to RFIs for visibility and accountability.

Enabling Communication and Collaboration

Tools within ��Ǵ�� allow for better engagement with communities and stakeholders. It can be used to share project updates, gather feedback, and document meetings and consultations. This enhances transparency and collaboration.

“��Ǵ�� helps with EPC and design-build by increasing collaboration between the stakeholders for all aspects of the project from the initial design to the design documents, RFI submittals, and daily logs,” said Capozzi at Vanguard Energy Partners. “It helps monitor what’s happening on-site on a daily basis for owners who may not have owners’ reps on-site full time.”

Implement Consistent Processes

The ��Ǵ�� platform can be used to identify, assess, and manage risks associated with power transmission projects. It also aids in documenting safety protocols and compliance with health and safety regulations.

Duke Energy’s inspection team used ��Ǵ�� to validate field activities and monitor quality and environment requirements on the Central Corridor Pipeline projects. This involved six to nine crews working across 13 miles of pipeline. They also set up the ability to push data to and from ��Ǵ��’s Inspection Tool and PowerBI to give them insights into operations.

Leverage Data to Generate Insights

��Ǵ�� provides real-time reporting and analytics features, enabling project managers to make informed decisions based on current project data. This can help in identifying potential delays or issues and taking proactive measures.

“��Ǵ�� allows us to drive some more efficiency in that construction process which helps us bring the cost of project execution down by being fully integrated without having to hire a third party construction manager or other services outside of our internal services,” said Daniel Dus, Head of Renewables at Adani Solar.

Having the right processes also means “showing the business can do what the business needs to do,” said Faith Glass-Wilson, Director of Continuous Improvement at AES.

“That can boil down to things like reporting infrastructure, data infrastructure, metrics, dashboards, and management of constraints to really focus on increased throughput.”

Not only can they minimize friction in their processes, they can also track operational efficiency for continuous improvement.

Conclusion

Amid the complexity of utility construction projects, power transmission and other energy developers must control what is in their power to control.

“Taking that administrative burden off of people by putting everything into one concise system…I can’t even quantify the improvement it made. It’s a behavior and a cultural thing,” said Jenny Bredt VP of Operational Excellence at RES.