Business View Caribbean | August 2019

44 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN AUGUST 2019 Open Systems International (www.osii.com) —headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota—provides open, state-of-the-art and high- performance enterprise automation solutions to utilities worldwide. These solutions include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, Energy Management Systems (EMS), Distribution Management Systems (DMS), Outage Management Systems (OMS), Generation Management Systems (GMS), Substation Automation (SA) Systems, Data Warehousing (Historian) Analytics, Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS), Situational Awareness Systems, Pipeline Network Management Systems (NMS), individual software and hardware products, and Smart Grid solutions for utility operations. OSI’s solutions empower its users to meet their operational challenges, day in and day out, with unsurpassed reliability and a minimal cost of technology ownership and maintenance. OSI is proud to serve its Caribbean customers, and is honored to be the preferred OT vendor for the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority. You can read more about their system on page 39. ...... For more information, please visit our website www.osii.com five years, about 50 percent of our customers will have underground power, as opposed to maybe five percent that had it before the storms. That will be a tremendous benefit and ease the recovery after a storm. “Where we’re not going underground, we have a fairly large composite pole program underway on St. Croix, St. John, St. Thomas, and Water Island. Since St. John and Water Island are smaller islands, not directly connected to ports, it takes longer to get materials to them, so we made sure they’re the furthest along before the coming hurricane season. Resin-based composite poles are replacing the wooden poles and should be in place on all the islands by the end of 2020. They are designed to withstand 200 mph winds; the guying is significantly more robust. There will also be an effort to have large transformers mounted at grade, to get that weight off the poles. “We also have a number of sub-stations being upgraded. We had an automated metering infrastructure network that was basically destroyed in the storms and had to be rebuilt. We’re getting about $15 million from FEMA to make that system pictured Meter serviceman