Power Quality & Voltage Regulation Not Included in AMI Business Cases
I have
looked at many AMI business cases filed with the Regulators, but I have yet to
see the savings from reduction of truck rollouts to check Power Quality and
Voltage Regulations. The main reason given why it so is that until AMI is fully
deployed and integrated with other systems, these benefits are still hard to
quantify.
Generally a
utility does not know about Power Quality (PQ) issues unless someone calls
about equipment failure or flickering lights. Then, they send a technician with Harmonic & Voltage
Monitoring equipment to the site to monitor it for some time. It takes time to collect data, analyze
it and find a solution.
Many years ago, when I worked for GE as a design engineer, our Elevator
Motors were failing in Miami's tallest Bank building and one can imagine the
urgency of the situation. I
installed Dranetz's Power Monitoring equipment to find the problems. It took us a month to find the problem
but today we could have found the problem with a Three Phase AMI Meter and
saved lots of time, money and inconvenience.
Today, many
three phase meters are capable of capturing THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) and
if installed they can send data when the meter sends data and or on demand. However neither the Head End software
provided by AMI vendors nor MDMs have features to accept the PQ data. This beneficial feature can be added
very easily. When I worked for a
company who was providing AMI, we used to discuss it, but we never had enough
resources to add such advance functions and always settled for adding simple
functions such as adding voltage monitoring and blinks, etc.
Voltage is
an important function as a utility has to maintain it with in + 5% (126V
to 114V). Generally the AMI helps
monitor the voltage and spot problems immediately.
Also,
SAIDI, SAIFI, MAIFI, CAIFI type indices are calculated by collecting data from
several collection points such as Substation (SCADA), OMS and Customer Service
and is a very cumbersome process. This information is reported to the Regulators. All of these benefits can be easily
quantified and materialized with additional IT tools and Integration. We will continue to discuss additional benefits in future
blogs.
