As power systems grow, change, and become more complex, utilities must enhance their control systems to satisfy the demands of today’s utility landscape.
Now more than ever, there’s a flood of data from the proliferation of real-time sensors on the network. The increased penetration of distributed energy resources on the medium voltage equipment makes things even more challenging. Control systems weren’t designed to handle factors like reverse power flow or unpredictable and dynamic loads, therefore, an ADMS has become an essential platform for distribution management.
Outage Management Benefits
It’s challenging to predict the exact location and time of a storm that can impact an electric utility. Power systems can suffer significant consequences because of poor weather conditions. Field crews try to beat the clock and battle through storm conditions to restore service to their customers.
The outage management component of an ADMS accommodates all planned and unplanned works that affect the grid. To narrow down an outage location, power utilities have historically relied on customer calls to alert them. Locating and repairing the damage can take hours, especially if several simultaneous outages exist across a utility’s service territory.
Outage time can be drastically reduced if the utility uses advanced technologies to leverage various sensors, automatic calls and AMI events grouping, and prediction engines to restore the power to the majority of the customers–improving their satisfaction. Once the operators have increased awareness of the storm events and incidents throughout the feeders, resolution steps within a switching plan can be created and issued quickly.
With customer calls, AMI events, powerful prediction engines, and real-time SCADA information, the OMS can predict probable outage locations on field devices and even low voltage equipment. This results in a faster problem resolution and optimal crew dispatching (some utilities have more than three hundred crews that need to be coordinated). Access to real-time crew availability provides efficient dispatching and allows the closest available crew with the right experience, equipment, and materials to be sent to the location of the outage. Additionally, the nature of the outage is known in advance of the crew’s arrival.
Utilities often have many legacy, home-grown applications that are part of their complex, redundant, and hard-to-implement solutions. One of the goals of an integrated ADMS implementation is to reduce the number of these applications. This results in a single master environment for all smart grid components – beginning with high voltage equipment down to the low voltage customer side. With the highly integrated and historized OMS in ADMS, utilities have more detailed outage tracking, leading to more reliable reporting.
Outage Management Implementation Challenges
A typical utility can serve millions of customers with the grid spanning thousands of miles, with several distribution controls centers and sometimes more than one million SCADA points. The magnitude and complexity of such a system make shortening the outage time while efficiently operating, a very challenging job. Since no utility has the exact same requirements, business processes and legacy systems, ADMS vendors must offer outage management solutions that are highly configurable and support third-party integrations like smart meters, portals, crew location integrations, and many more.
Limited-capacity legacy system replacement and data migration often require highly complex and integrated outage management solutions. With an integrated solution in place–such as an ADMS–all static and dynamic data become available for the operators, engineers, and web-based application users in the field. The number of web users can grow to several thousand depending on the utility’s dimension and business processes, leading to some architectural constraints of the ADMS.
Integration between legacy systems and the ADMS is often the most complex bottleneck for a utility. Energy management systems (EMS), OMSs, fault management systems, smart meters, crew management, and many more applications frequently use a variety of integration technologies and SCADA protocols (e.g., ICCP) for synthesis.
In some cases, integrated systems must be consolidated with the old-fashioned paper jobs for tracking database changes, temporary elements and similar items. However, technical difficulties with the integration between legacy systems and the ADMS are not the only problem. The impact these integrations have on the utility’s existing business processes must also be considered.
While smart meters are beneficial for outage management, AMI events can clutter the operator’s vision if the meters are unreliable. Therefore, it’s essential to have advanced methodologies in the ADMS that can predict and link outages more efficiently.
Although ADMS outage management implementation requires significant financial investment and some time-consuming structural changes in business processes, the long-term benefits of this system are inevitable. Upgrading or replacing old-fashioned, low-scalable and slow legacy systems will lead to a more reliable grid, increased safety and awareness, lower regulatory penalties, and improved customer satisfaction.
For a customized energy solution
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