Patent ID: 8112253

Claim:
An energy management system, comprising: a control center at a utility company with a power system; logic resources coupled to the power system and control center that provide a real time notice of conditions which effect energy management of the utility company, the logic resources providing an overview of a majority of a utility system, enabling an operator to access a geographic area from the overview, drill down to a specific area of the geographic area and perform analytics and a situation awareness of the smaller portion of the geographic area, the logic resources configured to re-use at least a portion of data and configurations from pre-existing software applications already in place in the control center, wherein situational awareness (i) facilitates drilling down on conditions that can effect energy management, (ii) facilitates distribution of power, generation of power, transmission and energy market systems, and (iii) mitigates effects of conditions that can create failures in energy management; the logic resources configured to re-use at least a portion of data and configurations from pre-existing software applications already in place in the control center, the logic resources enabling operators to create their own situational dashboards from large geographical overviews that are savable and reusable; and at least one user interface at the control center coupled to the logic resources, the at least one user interface including graphics that display one or more of, current status, mitigating factors and recommendations of the power system for one or more utility companies, the at least one user interface providing real time situation awareness of a potential energy management failure from the smaller portion of the geographic area and enabling the user to transmit information relative to the situation awareness of the smaller portion of the geographic area; the logic resources enable the operators to create their own situational dashboards from large geographical overviews.