than 300 grid sensors as part of a US$29 million
smart grid development project launched in May
2014. Power substation monitoring devices and
other smart grid technologies were already monitoring much of O&R’s network, but the new sensors brought more extensive certainty.
“The grid sensors told us what was going on
along vast stretches of power lines that would otherwise have been a black box,” Mr. Peverly says.
The benefits of the project are clear to both O&R’s
more than 300,000 customers and the organization. “Reliability is a key issue all utility companies
face. If we don’t meet our reliability targets, our
regulators apply negative revenue adjustments,”
Mr. Peverly says. Regulators also impose these
adjustments for power outages and delays in
restoring service.
To realize the installation project’s benefits
as quickly as possible, O&R identified its network’s worst-performing rural power circuits and
deployed the grid sensors to this infrastructure
first. After collecting and analyzing data about the
location of power outages, the organization was
able to predict where problems were likely to occur
and then strategically direct maintenance crews to
replace specific aging infrastructure.
Along with supporting this preventive project
approach, grid sensors significantly improved O&R
outage response time by immediately pinpointing
the location of the problem for repair crews. The
sensors even indicate which wire in a power line
the fault was on (left or right) and the cause of the
problem (such as a tree limb or an equipment malfunction). “The benefits of the sensors far exceeded
our expectations,” Mr. Peverly says.
Sensing the Future
Along with stabilizing existing power grids, grid
sensors are helping utilities study and build
networks that are more efficient and less fossil
fuel-intensive. UK Power Networks installed a
variety of sensors as part of its £ 28 million Low
Carbon London project to quantify the impact of
low-carbon power generation technologies on its
network, which delivers power to 25 percent of
the U.K. population.
One of the core areas of the project, which
launched in January
2011 and was completed
in December 2014,
focused on combined
heat and power (CHP)
systems. CHP systems,
also known as commercial cogeneration,
allow customers to
generate power and
sell it back to the grid.
“We knew commercial
cogeneration units were
out there, but we had no
empirical information
on how they were being
used,” says Michael
Clark, project director,
UK Power Networks,
London, England.
The project team had lots of questions.
How much power was being generated
by CHP systems and at what time of
day? Would the voltage coming into the
grid from them cause voltage excursions
outside of statutory limits? How much
extra power from CHP systems could
the grid handle?
Grid sensors were deployed at substations near commercial cogeneration sites
to help the team collect data and formulate answers. “The sensors allowed us to
build profiles about how these pieces of
equipment are run,” Mr. Clark says.
The project’s results “gave us confidence that we could get a building to
turn up [CHP electrical output] if we
asked them to,” Mr. Clark says. That’s a
valuable option, because it is cheaper to ask commercial cogeneration customers to push more
power into the grid at peak load times than it is
to build new substations to handle overcapacity,
in some cases. The project team identified capital
project savings of up to £ 43 million over the next
10 years. “Instead of just managing capacity” by
building new infrastructure, says Mr. Clark, “we’re
balancing the network.” —Kate Sykes
“Instead of
just managing
capacity [by
building new
infrastructure],
we’re balancing
the network.”
—Michael Clark, UK Power
Networks, London, England
The Low Carbon London project used sensors
to quantify the impact of low-carbon power
generation technologies on the city’s network.
