Ignition and wildfire risk are safety concerns for both utilities and their customers. There are many aspects to a utility wildfire risk mitigation plan. Deploying advanced analytics and line sensors, which monitor distribution feeders and laterals, can provide data-driven insights to help in multiple ways.
During a high wildfire risk, utilities modify protection settings to minimize reclosing and fuse burning. In these cases, sensors enable remote visibility along circuits for faster fault locating. Also, combining the power of advanced analytics with sensor waveform data enables utilities to predict outages due to equipment failure and vegetation and prevent potential ignitions.
The ability to quickly restore outages is a key aspect of improving reliability and resilience. Combining advanced analytics and line sensing technology has helped numerous utilities reduce outage durations. Line sensors are deployed along feeders and critical laterals to provide fault detection and load monitoring at more points between substations and meters.
With this increased remote visibility utilities can direct crews to more precise patrol areas, reducing fault finding times and outage durations. Also, with load data at more feeder locations, distribution operators can make better, safer switching decisions and enhance data-driven planning.
What would it mean to your utility if you could predict and preempt outages? With fewer outages reliability metrics would improve, O&M costs would be saved, and customer satisfaction would increase. Predicting outages represents a reliability breakthrough as well as an effective strategy to reduce wildfire risk.
And the good news — it’s possible today. Utilities are using advanced analytics and line sensor data to successfully predict outages. For certain types of outages, those caused by equipment failures and vegetation, it’s possible to identify waveform anomalies that proceed the permanent faults and predict outages with a high probability.
Sentient Energy provides innovative line sensing, data analytics, optimization and control technologies for the distribution grid.
We help utilities deliver safe, reliable and efficient power.
