Hansung Electric Company, the first electric power company in Korea, was formed in 1898, shortly after emperor Gojong sent a special envoy to the Edison General Electric Company in the United States to arrange for the installation of three 7-kilowatt (kW) steam power generators in the Kyongbok Palace.

A view of overhead transmission management.

The rapid development of regional electric companies followed, and in 1961, KECO was established with the merging of three companies to form a single national electric power company. In 1982, KECO was renamed the Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) and became a wholly government-owned corporation.

Today, KEPCO is the sole provider of electric power generation and distribution in South Korea, serving a population of nearly 49 million. In 2005, the company provided a total of 332,413 gigawatt-hours (GW-h) of electricity across the national power grid. The company currently operates 58 power-generating plants, 16 of which are nuclear.

KEPCO plays a key role in the South Korean economy due to the country's rapid economic expansion over the past decade. The company's workforce totals more than 34,000 employees, and it is one of the most profitable companies in the country.

The Korean government regularly issues a Long-Term Power Development Plan, which provides structure and direction in meeting the country's increasing demand for electricity and serves as a guide for additional power generation facilities, as well as the expansion of its transmission and distribution network. The new plan projects an increase in the country's power-generating capacity by 2020.

Comments Jae-ho Park, general manager of the Transmission Division, "Our substation capacity is expected to propel KEPCO into one of the five largest electric utility companies worldwide and establish it as an electric power hub in northeastern Asia."

KEPCO's transmission-related facilities are newly constructed, and others have recently been renovated. Because its legacy system was text based, the company faced many challenges in managing that information and responding in a timely manner in the case of a power outage or other emergency.

As a result, KEPCO began searching for a more efficient means of managing its growing collection of spatial data, ultimately leading to the implementation of its transmission geographic information system (TGIS) in 2003. TGIS was specifically designed to efficiently manage KEPCO's transmission-related facilities.

A view of TGIS underground transmission management.

TGIS is based on the ArcGIS family of software. The installation includes ArcInfo, ArcEditor, ArcGIS Schematics, ArcSDE, and ArcIMS. KEPCO and Sundosoft, Inc., an affiliated company of Esri Korea, Inc. (Esri's distributor in Korea), were responsible for implementing the project.

KEPCO and Sundosoft decided on a three-phase implementation of TGIS. In the first phase, the existing paper-based facility information was transferred into a digital database, which was separated into two parts: overhead transmission lines and underground transmission lines. This spatial database contains a variety of information determined to be critical in the development of TGIS, including the country's national basemaps, substation attributes, field information related to individual facilities, transmission network information, maintenance history, and lightning strike data. The system also maintains details regarding the availability of nearby resources for maintenance and repair projects. All this has not only led to greater efficiency but also a cost savings.

In the second phase, a decision support system was developed using the newly created digital database. Facility data from TGIS is extracted and forwarded to KEPCO's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to better manage the company's business processes and distribute GIS services across the organization.

The availability of the TGIS applications allows company management to make much better day-to-day and long-term decisions, such as when an existing facility should be replaced, what is needed to supply stable electricity to a region, and how many new transmission lines will be required to meet future electrical supply needs. ArcGIS was instrumental in this stage of development by providing systematic knowledge, an integrative framework, analytic methods, and intuitive visualization.

With the completion of the second phase, the company is currently preparing for implementation of the third phase, which will allow the system to function as a true enterprise GIS by further integrating its management capabilities and providing Web-based GIS services.

Using ArcGIS Server, the data and applications of TGIS will be available on the Web. The result will be an open, scalable, and standards-based GIS architecture that will integrate and leverage existing IT resources. The newly implemented GIS will meet diverse business and engineering needs now and in the future. All staff members that need transmission data will be able to easily find, review, and edit that data from their local computers without the need to install additional software. This will eliminate both the time needed to manage local data and the need to learn the skills necessary to do so. Senior managers at the company anticipate that the Web-based GIS will lead to significant cost savings and make KEPCO's work processes more efficient and seamless.

TGIS provides the staff members of KEPCO's Transmission Division with transmission facility data, maintenance history, and the current line status overlaid on national topographic and land registration basemaps. The GIS allows the staff to increase the value of its data with powerful visualization and cartographic capabilities and advanced spatial analyses. It is a key component in managing the transmission facility and has helped KEPCO streamline its business processes by providing more accurate asset and network data; increasing data access; and facilitating analysis, modeling, reporting, better regulatory compliance, and improved customer service.

Concludes Park, "TGIS has enabled KEPCO to more efficiently manage its transmission and substation information with the integration of facilities asset data into the GIS, the automation of certain maintenance procedures, and the implementation of a GIS-based site selection process. As a result, the company has been able to save costs and make better and quicker decisions, which makes it more competitive. Additionally, since the system continues to evolve and the third phase will include substation management, it has been decided to rename it the Transmission & Substation GIS because of the expanded functionality."

The Korea Electric Power Data Network, one of KEPCO's subsidiaries, has developed linkage from TGIS to other systems for facility planning and maintenance as well as construction and operation management. In addition, the spatial database is available to other government agencies for a nationwide geographic information-sharing project.

Currently, the company is involved in various foreign projects, including the Malaya Thermal Power Plant in the Philippines and the Wuzhi Circulated Fluidized Bed Combustion (CFBC) Power Project and Jiulishan Coal-Fired Power Project in the Henan Province of China. KEPCO is also working with the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization to build nuclear power generating units in the Kumho region of North Korea and is involved in transmission and distribution consulting projects in Myanmar, the Philippines, and Libya.

More Information

For more information, contact Kyung-soo Kim, Engineering Team, Transmission and Substation, KEPCO, in care of Jung-ho Jang, Esri Korea (e-mail: jhjang@esrikr.co.kr).