ESRI has announced that Reliant Energy Entex has completed implementation of ArcGIS 8.1 technology. Reliant Energy Entex is one of Reliant Energy’s three natural gas local distribution companies (LDC). Reliant Energy, based in Houston, Texas, is an international energy services and energy delivery company. Currently, two of the three LDCs-Reliant Energy Entex and Reliant Energy Arkla-and its electric LDC, Reliant Energy HL&P, have completed implementation of ESRI’s enterprise geographic information system (GIS) software.
Reliant Energy’s regulated utilities serve nearly 4.6 million electric and natural gas customers in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Minnesota. Using ArcGIS 8.1 technology Reliant Energy maintains an infrastructure across more than 150,000 square miles; 33,000 miles of electric distribution lines in Texas, which includes Houston, the country’s fourth largest city; and 48,000 miles of gas mains in five southern states, serving more than 900 communities including Houston.
Throughout Reliant Energy, there are currently approximately 3,000 GIS users including 200 staff editing the GIS database. Versioning is used to manage multiple user editing of the GIS database. Examples of how GIS is used at Reliant Energy include underground asset locating, pole attachment maintenance, streetlight asset management supporting billing and maintenance, cathodic protection, gas network analysis, electric network analysis, and meter reader routing.
Reliant Energy’s enterprise GIS runs using ESRI’s ArcGIS 8.1 technology. ArcGIS is a scalable system of software for geographic data creation, management, integration, analysis, and dissemination for every organization from an individual to a globally distributed network of people. ArcGIS runs on seven production databases, all of which are maintained in the Houston, Texas, corporate headquarters. Running on the UNIX platform, one database stores 50 gigabytes (GB) of data and six others, running on the Windows 2000 platform, maintain 3 GB each. Reliant Energy also uses ArcFM software from Miner and Miner and GTIView software from GIS Technologies, Inc. (GTI).
More than 365 feature classes are stored and managed in the enterprise GIS. Data sets maintained include customer service points, customer gas load, electric devices, street centerlines, easements, gas equipment, land parcels, and more. Future applications include outage management with CES International, document imaging with GTI and FileNET, a design optimization tool, mobile data access for field crews, wireless real-time data collection and correction, and more.
