Substation 60-Hz PQ Monitors

Risk Reduction Category

Grid Monitoring

Technology Description

The term power quality monitor, here, refers to any monitoring device from a relay-based power quality monitor, to a fault recorder, to a dedicated PQ monitor. While most individuals are familiar with using power quality monitors to record voltage sags due to faults for later analysis, the data collected by PQ monitors is presently under-utilized with respect to wildfire detection and mitigation. In short, they can be used to improve situational awareness as described in the following points:

  • Understanding how many times potential ignition events occurred that didn’t actually ignite (i.e., fault count)
  • Establish baseline for the number of faults that have occurred, historically, in order to determine the effectiveness of a mitigation approach. For example, before compared to after installing covered conductor.
  • When data from PQ monitors are combined with smart meters and add V, I, PF, etc from SCADA, improve opportunities to better understand where recurrent faults are happening, location, possibly cause & send someone out to do an inspection.

A PQ monitor on each distribution feeder exiting a substation might pick up electrical signals on that feeder perhaps indicating a fault or the potential for a fault. Moreover, impedance characteristics of these signals might provide an indication of the location of an issue. Thus, repair crews or fire crews could be alerted and sent to that location.

Technical Readiness (Commercial Availability)

The following list of manufacturers is the product of an Internet search using a general description of the technology as the search term. Sometimes more than one variation on the search term is used. The objective is to identify demonstration-ready products available in the category.

General Electric (GE)

https://www.gegridsolutions.com/multilin/catalog/f60.htm

ABB

https://library.e.abb.com/public/64e517269f719a5bc12573af006d2dd2/REF_550_DB41-902%20Rev.E.pdf

Schweitzer Engineering Labs (SEL)

https://selinc.com/products/735/

Dranetz

https://www.dranetz.com/product-services/encore/

Power Montiors, Inc.

https://powermonitors.com/products/

Implementations / Deployments

Countless numbers of power quality monitors are deployed, but may be presently under-utilized for wildfire situational awareness, such as mitigation approaches.

TVA has operated an impressive grid-monitoring system that may be able to calculate fault locations and possibly arcing locations. While a PQ monitor might be programmed to send alerts about high-frequency events that could be related to high-impedance faults (HIF), capacitor-switching events also cause similar high-frequency patterns.

280 Multilin F60s installed by Potomac Electric Power Company (Pepco) in 2006

Innovations as of Mid 2023

Potential Enrichment Work Opportunity

References

[1] Three Lines of Defense for Wildfire Risk Management in Electric Power Grids: A Review, Ali Arab, et al., IEEEAccess, 4/28/2021.

[2] A. C. Depew, J. M. Parsick, R. W. Dempsey, C. L. Benner, B. D. Russell and M. G. Adamiak, “Field experience with high-impedance fault detection relays,” 59th Annual Conference for Protective Relay Engineers, 2006., College Station, TX, USA, 2006, pp. 6 pp.-, doi: 10.1109/CPRE.2006.1638693.