Seguin, Texas, is an hour northeast of San Antonio and has just over 30,000 residents. The City of Seguin serves the community with electric, water, and wastewater utilities. Smart grid solutions manager John Saldana manages geographic information system (GIS) maps for the electric and water utility departments.
“If anyone needs a map for internal, nonpublic information to support utility infrastructure projects—whether it’s electric, water, or sewer—that comes from us,” Saldana said. “We are the [go-between] between utilities and the city, so we support all of their technology needs beyond the traditional IT department.”
Seguin is experiencing solid growth as it expands toward neighboring New Braunfels, and vice versa. As farmland between the cities is developed, demand for municipal utilities is rising.
Challenge
The city wanted to accurately map existing assets prior to development to avoid construction hits. Staff also wanted to map all new construction, ensuring that field crews could easily service legacy and new assets in the new grid in the future.
“The assets are all very close in proximity to each other, so it’s important that we have the best accuracy we can,” Saldana said.
To collect location data with high accuracy, Saldana deployed four Arrow Gold Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers from Esri partner Eos Positioning Systems. The Arrow Gold receiver connects to a base station that provides real-time kinematic (RTK) corrections, allowing crews to stream survey-grade locations into ArcGIS Field Maps using iPad devices.
A man stands outside wearing a yellow visibility vest and uses surveying equipment attached to a wooden poleCity of Seguin smart grid solutions manager John Saldana maps a temporary electric meter in the Hannah Heights neighborhood. To capture the data, he’s using ArcGIS Field Maps on an iPad device, connected to an Arrow Gold GNSS receiver receiving real-time kinematic (RTK) corrections from the city’s Arrow Gold base station. Assets like these can often be close to each other, creating a need for survey-grade accuracy in staff’s mobile maps.
“Data does not exist in a silo,” Saldana said. “It’s designed to be shared, expanded upon, integrated, and consumed upstream and downstream. We keep this in mind as we’re building and capturing something as simple as a point.” Today, the City of Seguin employs one full-time data collection employee.
Solution
At city meetings, stakeholders discuss how to tie existing utilities into the municipal system and whether these require upgrades to accommodate growth. Saldana’s team then maps the utilities. During construction, the as-built drawings are mapped in real-time. This dramatically improved them.
“When we receive a big roll of paper drawings, those are not 100 percent accurate,” Saldana said. “By going out there and validating everything ourselves, we can be sure years later [that] when we receive a call, we know where our assets are.”
Utility data analyst Felecia Helms performs QC on the incoming data before publishing it to an enterprise GIS. Helms leads the city’s ArcGIS Utility Network migration. Previously, Saldana created Utility Network prototypes. Helms now inputs the city’s electric assets, ensures that data meets production-level standards, and migrates it to the production utility network.
“We’re ensuring the data is correct,” Helms said. “Then we can do a full connection for our utility network to move to the next phase.”
Results
Once the migration is complete, ArcGIS Utility Network will be used to manage the entire electric system and feed the outage management system (OMS) with valuable data for proper intervention. After that, Helms will tackle the Utility Network migration for water.
Map of a power distribution substation in blue and white with asset features labeled in red and blueSeen here is the Seguin substation; collecting location data about nearby electrical assets helps Saldana and Helms identify assets that are missing on the map.
Ultimately, Saldana says, the city’s success lies in its extremely accurate GIS data powering utility services. The City of Seguin’s enterprise GIS acts as the system of record for countless downstream systems including the OMS and the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), and billing systems.
“I’m passionate about traversing all these data integrations and making sure it’s accurate,” Saldana said. “People have to recognize that good asset management starts with collecting good data as step one.”
Partner
Eos Positioning Systems is the Canadian designer and manufacturer of premier, high-accuracy GNSS receivers for the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) market. Eos GNSS receivers, which include the Skadi Series and Arrow Series, provide real-time submeter-, subfoot-, and centimeter-level location accuracy into any device or app. All Eos GNSS receivers are completely device agnostic and support iOS, Android, and Windows devices. Eos also offers advanced mapping solutions—tilt compensation, underground utility mapping, and much more.
