CAD Standards for Electric Utilities

[Scoobydoo]

I am looking for CAD Standards applicable to the electric utility industry. I have wrote a CAD Standard for our company that we are currently using, but it is going to expand quite a bit and I am just wanting to see how/what other electric utility companies are doing to see if there is anything I can change on our end from a CAD Standards/Management viewpoint.

Thanks in advance!

[Murph_map]

I worked for an Electric co-op for 10 years and work 5 years with a reseller supporting electric utilities with AutoCAD, AutoCAD Map3D and AutoCAD Utility Design. Over those 15 years the only thing I saw standard was the symbol for poles on the map, everyone used a filled in circle black in color. Are you using vanilla AutoCAD or Map3D or any other GIS type software?

[Scoobydoo]

Thank you for your response. I am also working for an electric co-op (8 years now & 14 years on the low voltage side for electrical consulting firms) and have seen many CAD Standards over the years but the folks here didn't know what a CAD Standard was until I started here. We are using StakeOut (soon to be WorkStudio) for our staking program, ArcMap 10.1, GOSync Mapbook, and for AutoCAD, we are using AutoCAD C3D 2015 & 2016. I have created all the CAD blocks & details for the subdivision jobs, titleblocks, templates, tool palettes, text styles, dimension styles, pen tables, etc. I was just curious if there was anything out there from an electric utility that may/may not point me in the right direction as far as an "industry" standard was concerned.

[Tyke]

I worked for very many years, in various companies, for utilities companies both here in Germany and formerly in the UK and can only agree with what Murph said. They all had CAD/drawing standards but no two were the same. Symbols, line-styles, colours, layering and many other things were all different. Whilst most used AutoCAD several other CAD systems were also used. We used to attach XData to objects and store information such as cable type and size, pole number, erection date, etc. This was later exported to various GIS systems.

 

If you can't find any official industry standards I would suggest you trying to get hold of examples from other utility companies and pick what in your own opinion is the best from each.

[Murph_map]

We used to use some of the standards from the old REA agency which is now RUS http://www.rd.usda.gov/about-rd/agencies/rural-utilities-service

[Scoobydoo]

Our cooperative is not funded by RUS but we do follow most of their guidelines. Our overhead, underground, and subtransmission specs mostly follow RUS. It just seems like quite a bit of our overhead projects usually don't require CAD drawings, but our underground and some transmission projects do because often we have contractors that do the work. Usually what we do is we georeference the CAD background (that we receive from the consultant) to ArcMap so that the background is tied to our coordinate system. Once we georeference the file, then we work on our CAD design and it makes it alot easier to export the information back into our mapping system. Like Tyke has suggested, I may get in touch with one of our sister cooperatives and see if they have a CAD Standard that they are using that they would be willing to share. What I am interested in seeing is how templates are setup, handling consultant files that are received, layer naming convention, text styles, etc., just basic CAD info. I am revising our CAD Standard now that we will push out to all departments within the company and not just the Line Design group.

[Murph_map]

Good luck hope you have better luck than I did. I would get one engineer to go along, another would not want the change. SCADA would be behind me but management didn't know what I was wanting to do. They finally decide to go with ESRI software and contract to map/GPS everything out again, and that wasn't cheap for 80,000 miles of line.