Electrical Substations

Substation Automation

SUBSTATION AUTOMATION AND INTEGRATION PROGRAMS

Newton-Evans Research Company, Inc. of Ellicott City, MD is preparing to publish market research findings from Volume 1 of a four-volume study, “The World Market for Substation Automation and Integration Programs in Electric Utilities: 2017-2020.” Volume 1 of this Substation Automation and...

Breakers & Relays

Dynamic Resistance Measurement

Condition testing of circuit breaker’s arcing contacts BY BUDO MILOVIC, DV-Power The preventive maintenance on a high-voltage (HV) breaker consists of several routine tests. The timing and motion tests are methods used to assess the breaker’s mechanical condition. When the timing and motion...

Substation Technologies

Vibration and Noise Control in T&D

It is very often that “just putting some rubber” to isolate structures creates an inefficient or even a vibration isolation problem, without taking into account the characteristics of the whole system: such as media environment and temperature, material stiffness adjusted to the...

Substation Testing & Maintenance

FERC Complaint Targets Duke, PJM Transmission Planning

A coalition of large energy consumers and ratepayer advocates has filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), urging the agency to prohibit transmission owners from independently planning "local" transmission projects exceeding 100 kilovolts (kV). The coalition argues...

Physical Security & Monitoring

Geomagnetic Disturbances: A Danger to the Power Grid

In 1989, the Québec grid collapsed as equipment protection relays tripped in a cascading sequence of events. Six million consumers were left without power for up to nine hours. The cause of this major outage was a geomagnetic disturbance (GMD). Geomagnetic disturbances occur during solar...

Substation Protection

Substation Architecture Protection

Solving common mistakes in communications cabling for electrical utilities BY FRANK KODITEK, Belden Inc. In the energy industry, there are numerous types of cables in use for a wide variety of applications, from transporting high-voltage current for miles to providing power and data connectivity...

Home Transformation Electrical Substations

Animal Mitigation for Electric Utilities

Prevent animal- and bird-caused outages to improve reliability

BY MARTY NILES, Cantega Technologies

Utilities in North America are under enormous pressure from regulators, customers, and investors to improve reliability performance. Many of the mergers and acquisitions of utilities around North America are being conditioned on how combining two or more companies would improve statistics from utility indexes and indicators including SAIFI (System Average Interruption Frequency Index), SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index) and CAIDI (Customer...