S&C Pad-Mounted Gear — Another Example of “More for Less.”

Recently, a large municipal utility needed to replace several metal-clad and metal-enclosed switchgear lineups serving one of the country’s major theme parks. Component failures and animal-induced flashovers were causing forced outages in this 30-year-old gear. In an environment where reliability is vital, this gear was becoming a burden.

The replacement gear had to be resistant to animal intrusion. It also needed to be integrated into the utility’s existing SCADA system. Aesthetics were also a concern, so the utility mandated that the replacement gear be less obvious than the old 120-inch-high lineups.

S&C’s Remote Supervisory PME Pad-Mounted Gear met all of the criteria at the lowest cost. Two 15-kV Model PME-11 units replace a six-bay lineup with four feeders. The two units function in a loop with a normally open point in one of the units. With the PME-style construction, all live parts are completely isolated from the environment. However, in the unlikely event of an internal fault in one of the units, the other is unaffected — cutting in half the number of customers subject to the outage. Plus, the gear included fully integrated sensing, communication, and motor-operation, for use with the utility’s SCADA system. This project served as an example of how S&C pad-mounted gear can be substituted for metal-clad or metal-enclosed switchgear for some applications. Typically, the pad-mounted gear alternative is lower in cost and requires less space. The photo shown at right — taken before removal of the metal-clad gear — shows how the two types of gear compare in size.

Plus, the S&C Remote Supervisory PME units allowed complete integration with the utility’s SCADA system, allowing their engineers to monitor status and isolate faulted circuits from the office. And reliability has been improved even further because the PME gear is less susceptible to animal-induced flashovers.