In today's troubled climate, the utilities sector is in the midst of unprecedented transformation. Several factors are driving fundamental change: liberalization and increased competition, strategic mergers and acquisitions, regulatory pressure around climate change, systems reliability, convergence, electricity and renewable concerns.
Most rural medium-voltage networks are configured with the primary feeder protected by a circuit breaker or automatic circuit recloser (ACR), whilst the lateral line is protected by a fuse. When a fault occurs on the lateral line, the fuse operates to clear the fault. The problem with this is that the fuse blows on all faults, causing downstream customers to lose power and requiring a line crew to replace the fuse. In most cases, this sustained outage is unnecessary as the fault is transient - a momentary outage is sufficient to clear the fault.
It’s clear something is wrong. Business interruptions, outages, and other negative consequences happen far too often. Many problems reoccur – only to be – fixed again. Cost containment remains an ongoing battle. We can’t debate the IT experts because they have all the answers, but at the same time we instinctively know something is not right. The feeling remains.
For a utility company (electricity, gas or water), the channels of interaction with customers include direct mail, IVR/CTI, call centers and the Web. These channels serve two purposes: direct communication with customers and operation of business functions such as connect/disconnect, billing and payment that are core to a utility’s business.
This paper considers performance, reliability and regulatory aspects of three-phase grid-tie photovoltaic (PV) inverters and the arrays to which they are connected, with an emphasis placed on systems greater than 100 kW. By Eric Seymour, Advanced Energy Industries, Inc.
The growth of electric powered vehicles will lead to a fundamental shift in the existing landscape in areas such as design and manufacturing, distribution and after sales service, and energy supply and infrastructure.
By Mesa Scharf and Michael Mills-Price, PV Powered. The purpose of this white paper is to highlight the major economic benefits and technical advancements PV Powered and its partners—Portland General Electric (PGE), Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL), Sensus, and Northern Plains Power Technologies (NPPT)—are pursuing under the Solar Energy Grid Integration System (SEGIS) Stage 2 program to address the challenges utilities will experience as the penetration of distributed photovoltaic power generation increases. The SEGIS program advancements will help lay the foundation for an “intelligent” or smart inverter capable of integrating large-scale photovoltaic power generation into the Smart Grid with greater stability and protection, and at a far more competitive Levelized Cost of Energy. By providing the monitoring, control, and other capabilities utilities need to successfully integrate high penetrations of distributed photovoltaic power, the industry will be in a better position to satisfy even the most aggressive Renewable Portfolio Standards.
The Smart Grid is a series of interconnected, interoperable networks of control systems and asset‐management tools, empowered by sensors, communication pathways and information tools – all designed to help utilities deliver energy more efficiently to customers. Implementing the Smart Grid requires connecting existing utility grid infrastructure, in order to leverage legacy investments, as well as enabling future innovations with adaptable “future‐proof” investments in new Smart Grid technologies. Instead of focusing on single Smart Grid elements, the entire Smart Grid infrastructure of hardware, software and communications connectivity architected with the following underlying principles needs to be taken into consideration.
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