Eat fresh fruits and vegetables. Exercise. Keep your vaccinations up to date. Cut saturated fat out of your diet. People make plenty of resolutions at the start of every new year to improve their health. Can we make similar resolutions to improve the health of the electric grid?
We typically talk about a healthy grid as one that is reliable. But like health problems, reliability problems don’t just appear overnight without warning. Equipment issues, for instance, often emerge gradually, until one day—poof—equipment malfunctions and an outage results.
Aging utility infrastructure is a key issue in maintaining a reliable grid. In fact, the 2011 Black & Veatch Strategic Directions in the Electric Utility Industry survey revealed that aging infrastructure is the top operational concern among utility industry executives. But apart from simply replacing aging equipment en masse, utilities can adopt new approaches to help reduce wear and tear on utility assets and extend asset life. This can allow deferral of capital expenditures that would otherwise be needed to protect the health of the grid. Some approaches:
- Reduce overloading. During times of peak demand, grid devices carry electric loads close to their designed peak limit. Particularly during a heat wave, when high electricity demand combines with high temperatures to create thermal stresses, grid equipment faces accelerated aging, and sometimes can even malfunction under these stresses. Just as people may adopt stress reduction regiments to improve health, peak load management reduces stresses on the grid. Many new smart grid applications can help utilities better manage this peak demand, including demand response programs, volt/var optimization with conservation voltage reduction (which effectively lowers peak demand without impacting consumers), and even community energy storage.
- Mitigate the impact of short circuits. The considerable damage caused by short circuits can be limited with new technology. S&C’s Pulseclosing Technology™, for instance, reduces the energy let-through from a conventional reclosing operation by 98%, significantly reducing wear and tear from short circuits. You can watch a video of conventional reclosing compared to pulseclosing to see the difference.
- Develop a proactive asset management program. More utilities are taking this approach, whereby they evaluate grid assets to determine what devices are at greatest risk for malfunction—and what malfunctions would have the biggest impact on service reliability—then prioritize those assets for refurbishment or replacement. Third-party service providers can also help develop and run asset management programs.
Other smart grid solutions – like “spot” distribution automation programs, where automatic restoration technology is deployed on worst-performing distribution lines – can help improve reliability for aging sections of the grid. They won’t necessarily extend the life of assets, but they can improve service reliability in the event of an equipment malfunction and thus allow utilities to defer a more expensive equipment replacement program.
As we start a new year, what resolutions have you made for improving the health of the electric power grid?
Customer Load – Another point often missed is the need to keep in touch with customers and their added load. This is especially true for faster growing market segments in the tech-commercial and industrial sector. The added load report will assist distribution engineers in better planning and assessment to better serve the customer; including reduction of unplanned outages.