Avista has multiple hydro and thermal generating facilities dispersed throughout its service territory which includes Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Plants have to report output and stream conditions to the Real Time Scheduling group for input into Avista’s Nucleus power trading system on an regular basis. These numbers are utilized for a variety for situational awareness and reporting scenarios. The plant output and stream conditions for each plant were read from multiple data sources (offline gauges, HMI consoles, etc.) and manually entered in Excel Loadsheets that were customized to each plant. The Loadsheets were cumbersome to use and maintain and resulted in files stored on multiple drives in multiple locations within the generation control network. This process was targeted as one of Avista's Business Process Improvement (BPI) initiatives. The goal was to standardize the process, increase accuracy of the data, and reduce the workload related to this process allowing plant and administrative personnel to focus on other plant duties. PI was selected as the system to consolidate this plant data and drive toward a standardized process for all plants. The PI Asset Framework was used to embed the calculations that were being performed in the spreadsheets, and Coresight was the delivery mechanism for visualization of the data. Currently, each hydro plant is using a standardized Coresight display for reporting and PI has become the single location for reporting Loadsheet data to the Real Time Scheduling group for
entry into the Nucleus application. The result is multiple hours saved each month at each plant that can be dedicated to
other higher value plant tasks. The next step for the project will focus on integrating the data from PI automatically to the
Real Time Scheduling Nucleus application.