Artur Brei
Head of Graphic Data Processing
UZ (Unterfrnkische berlandzentrale eG)
Germany

Biography
Artur hold a master’s degree in engineering. His professional career started at an engineering company that dealt with surveying and civil engineering. Since 1999 he is the head of the graphic data processing at the Unterfränkische Überlandzentrale, shortly named ÜZ in Lülsfeld, a regional German electric utility in the Northern of Bavaria. His department includes 8 employees, responsible for documentation, quality management and IT processes concerning technical assets in GIS and all integrated database systems (ERP, Customer account data, CRM).Since 2005 he is supervising the facility management of our company. Artur am also the president of the Autodesk® Geospatial User Group Germany e.V. (AGU Germany)

Abstract


New wind farms and huge photovoltaic facilities have a massive impact on Germany’s power grid, not only since Fukushima. The ÜZ in Lülsfeld is a medium sized utility company in Northern Bavaria. We operate a typical regional distribution network in Germany - a large area with many little towns and villages and very much place for renewable plants. In 2013 our electricity turnover was 497 million kWh in total and the renewables had a share of more than 285 million kWh what is more than 50% of the electricity turnover. Therefor we had and still have to invest three times as much than before 2009. And all that work has to be executed with the same number of employees. GIS is our basic element for design, as-built documentation, operation-, maintaining-, project- and process-management of all our technical assets. One Oracle Database handles this complex asset data management including all spatial geographical data and is also still flexible enough to meet challenges like adding renewables to the data model. The system is easy to use and it’s also not difficult to connect with other data systems like SAP, customer account system and so on. This is the reason why everybody in our company works with GIS – the most of them are writing data as well. One key point of our GIS application is to use more graphical shaping/map of one technical asset – as-built map, management plan for low voltage, medium voltage and so on. So the operating team can directly change fuses, set switches and always knows about load capacity in the low voltage network. This is also an important component of “Smart Grid” in the near future for us.