eptil

Both sides use GIS to do their jobs. The scada part is a little different since one-line diagrams are all that is needed for that. But the dispatching is all GIS based.

We make significant revenue based on accurate maps and good data as well. Just fixing our attachment rental inventory and keeping it accurate pays for all of the GIS system and upkeep with money to spare.

Its not so much that you have to balance the load in a given area. You must balance the load beyond breakers as much as possible. If the load becomes too far out of balance, the much larger feeder breakers at the substations will trip to protect the grid upstream from the imbalance.

The cell companies are actually moving away from the large towers as 5g service is deployed in favor of microcells.

http://www.steelintheair.com/Blog/2017/04/top-10-things-the-...

They can be built into decorative lighting poles such that you would really have to pay attention to notice them.

Your bottom picture also shows half of a snowshoe fiber slack storage location. They are used at almost every splice so the splice can be moved to the ground easily and placed into a splicing trailer. That fiber pictured is a strand and lash construction where a high strength steel wire is placed and then the fiber is basically tied to it. We have stopped using any of it in favor of ADSS fiber which means all dielectric self supporting. We can place it in the power space and avoid dealing with the communications space problems.

We have also started using ductile iron poles. They are much easier to drill and last longer than the galvanized.

This is only true at dysfunctional utilities. We dont even have paper maps and havent since the 90s. GIS is the standard for all our employees.

Depending on performance, this could be made into a very decent GIS viewer. You could even go so far as to do layer menus and draw ordering. Labeling might be really expensive though.

What would it take to add lines and points to the supported types and make them clickable with perhaps a fudge factor radius?