Pacific Gas and Electric Company Achieves USD 5.7 Million in Annual Savings with Bentley Substation
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Pacific Gas and Electric Company Achieves USD 5.7 Million in Annual Savings with Bentley Substation - 1

USER BENEFIT BRIEF Organization Pacific Gas and Electric Company Headquarters San Francisco, California, USA Web Site www.pge.com FAST FACTS Challenges • Maintaining reliable electricity delivery to over 5 million customers in northern and central California • Heavy projected workloads for substation design teams due to smart-grid initiative • Inefficient, outdated substation design process requiring excessive manual effort Objectives • Reduce electric substation design time • Increase design quality by reducing errors • Faster and more accurate bills of material ROI • Bentley Substation has reduced substation design time by approximately 40 percent • Average savings equate to approximately 500 hours of design labor and 40 hours of construction labor per substation project • PG&E estimates total annual savings to be USD 5.7 million across the approximately 120 substation projects completed each year Pacific Gas and Electric Company Achieves USD 5.7 Million in Annual Savings with Bentley® Substation The Smart Grid Tsunami Like so many utilities with aging infrastructure, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) needed to modernize its substations and boost service reliability. “As we began a massive, multi-year smart-grid project to address these issues, we knew it would be difficult for our substation design team to keep up with the volume of design projects using our traditional, manual design process,” explained Alexander Liang, senior design engineer at PG&E. “With over 1,000 substations in our electric system, we needed to work faster and smarter – so we turned to Bentley Systems for help.” A long-term Bentley customer and one of the United States’ largest electric and gas utilities, PG&E is based in San Francisco, California, and employs over 22,000 employees. The company provides natural gas and electric service to approximately 15 million people throughout a 70,000-square-mile service area in northern and central California. Reaching the Limitations of Early CAD Technology PG&E’s substation design practice had remained fundamentally unchanged since the 1980s when the company adopted computer-aided drafting (CAD). While CAD initially increased productivity, inefficiencies remained because of the two-dimensional, graphics-only nature of early CAD technology. Consisting of only vector lines, shapes, dots and text, CAD drawings lack any intelligence about the physical entities they represent. For PG&E, this meant that for each substation project, designers had to manually create, maintain, and update designs across countless 2D drawings. “We would draft each and every view pertaining to an outdoor arrangement of equipment,” explained Liang. “We’d start by drawing up the plan view and then proceed to draw elevations and sections, each time relying on our experience to figure out what each view should look like.” In an effort to save time, designers often copied drawings from other projects, but if these seed drawings were incompletely or incorrectly adapted to the new project, the new project was fraught with errors. Furthermore, whenever a design change was made, it had to be manually propagated across all impacted drawings. “This was one of the main drawbacks of unintelligent CAD design – the excessive time people spent manually drafting and updating various views of the same equipment,” said Liang. Inefficiencies were not limited to the drafting process. To create a bill of material for a given project, designers had to visually inspect physical arrangement drawings, count equipment and measure conductor and conduit lengths. The information was then entered into a separate system for procurement. “This manual process was time consuming, inconsistent, and prone to error,” said Liang.

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Pacific Gas and Electric Company Achieves USD 5.7 Million in Annual Savings with Bentley Substation - 2

“Our analysis revealed that Bentley Substation could indeed help us improve productivity and quality while preserving important design processes.” – Amir Mohebbi, substation engineering manager, PG&E “With over 1,000 substations in our electric system, we needed to work faster and smarter – so we turned to Bentley Systems for help.” – Alexander Liang, senior design engineer, PG&E Leaping Ahead to Intelligent Substation Design Given these limitations, management determined that its existing substation design process would make it difficult – if not impossible – to meet the demands of the...

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Pacific Gas and Electric Company Achieves USD 5.7 Million in Annual Savings with Bentley Substation - 3

“Bentley’s ongoing development and support has helped Pacific Gas and Electric Company meet its goals and provide twice the amount of engineering services with our current staff.” – Nam Trinh, senior design engineer, PG&E Another benefit of Bentley Substation has been an overall improvement in drawing aesthetics and quality. Previously, these attributes could vary significantly depending on the designer and level of experience. Bentley Substation has enabled more consistent quality by dramatically reducing manual drafting and enforcing PG&E design standards. PG&E estimates that the...

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