Basin Electric Discovers the Power of Editing in Updating Thousands of Power Plant Drawings

Basin Electric, headquartered in Bismarck, North Dakota is a consumer-owned cooperative which supplies power to nine states in the upper Midwest. Basin Electric's service area of more than 400,000 square miles is the largest geographic service area of any non-governmental utility company in the United States. Basin Electric has more than 300,000 existing manually drafted power plant drawings in storage. There are several hundred thousand additional drawings for the gasification plant alone. "Most of these are working drawings because of the constant changes that are needed as a result of new construction for upgrading systems or design and engineering changes at the plants," said Lynn McNulty, CAD systems coordinator. Many of these drawings are on sepia media, a brown translucent paper which deteriorates, becomes crispy, and turns the background of the image brown with age. "Because a lot of the image is lost over time, many drawings would have to be redrafted from scratch using AutoCAD. For D- and E-size drawings with a lot of detail, such as an electrical schematic, it would take a week to complete a redrafted drawing," explained McNulty. An initial attempt to eliminate this cumbersome task was made by purchasing an Optigraphics scanning and editing system for two Sun stations. This limited productivity because the two stations had to be shared by 10 draftspersons, but purchasing additional stations would have been too costly, reported McNulty.

The Solution

Basin Electric decided to explore a more cost effective solution for editing their drawings. A little more than two years ago, they purchased 10 copies of GTXRaster CAD raster editing software which they have since upgraded. After scanning up to 10 operators at a time could be editing drawings which allowed many more drawings to be completed each day. McNulty had looked at other raster editing systems, but chose GTXRaster CAD 2.0 because the command structure is identical to AutoCAD. For example, the Erase command in AutoCAD is gErase in GTXRaster CAD 2.0. Other editing programs had new commands which would have resulted in a longer learning curve. Currently, Basin Electric is a little more than half way through scanning all of the drawings. The time saved in redrafting is so dramatic, McNulty could not even estimate how much time and labor is saved with GTXRaster CAD 2.0. Basin Electric plans to complete scanning all of the old drawings within a year.