May 2, 2005
IntelliTEAM II® Exceeds Reliability Goals in an Award-Winning Project.
Background
ENMAX Power Corp. serves the city of Calgary, Alberta, and surrounding area. Their open-loop radial distribution system operates at 13.2 kV and 25 kV. It includes 33 substations with normally open ties between the feeders. In 2002, ENMAX commissioned a study which concluded that feeder automation would help them achieve their objectives for heightened reliability.
What did they do?
ENMAX selected S&C to supply automated switching equipment, radios, commissioning, and training services. The proven performance of S&C’s Scada-Mate® Switching System and Remote Supervisory PMH Pad-Mounted Gear, and the innovative IntelliTEAM II™ Automatic Restoration System, were deciding factors.
The first phase of the project was managed by S&C’s Power Systems Services Division. ENMAX decided to manage subsequent phases of this large-scale, five-year feeder automation project themselves once they saw how easy it is to configure IntelliTEAM II. No complicated modeling is needed . . . IntelliTEAM II easily accommodates the inevitable feeder circuit changes.
The new system handles complex feeder configurations with multiple tie points.IntelliTEAM II is scalable to accommodate virtually any feeder configuration. It allows S&C’s 5800 Series Automatic Switch Controls to work together in teams to automatically isolate faults and restore power. Each team consists of a line segment bounded by automated switches.
ENMAX’s specifications required that the system be capable of automatically restoring service to unfaulted feeder sections in less than one minute. IntelliTEAM II makes this possible. Its distributed intelligence architecture facilitates a shorter communication path for restoration data than centralized-intelligence approaches. Even if communication to the central control facility is lost, IntelliTEAM II will continue to provide power restoration.
UtiliNet® Radios act as both repeaters and data transceivers, linking the automatic switch controls and providing SCADA control of IntelliTEAM II. This highly scalable peer-to-peer communication network eliminates the possible single point of failure inherent to centralized control schemes.
SCADA information is collected from the teams through head-end radios located at the originating substation of each automated feeder. The data is converted from serial to Ethernet format, and transferred to a broadband fiber-optic network. At the control center, the data passes through a firewall and is concentrated in the S&C Proxy Server. The Proxy Server provides data simultaneously to three systems: the ENMAX SCADA master station, S&C WinMon® Device Management Software (for remote configuration and monitoring of the system), and the Substation Logic Module — which controls feeder breakers and enables automatic restoration of the first feeder segment out of the substation.
Award-Winning Results
Phase I of the project was completed in early 2004, automating eighteen feeders on the 25-kV system. By March 2005, fourteen outage events had occurred, and the system averted an estimated 1,042,000 customer-outage minutes and 12,000 customer outages. For 2004 this represented an overall reduction in SAIDI of 8.6% and a SAIFI reduction of 1.7% . . . very impressive performance considering that only 16% of ENMAX customers are presently served by the system.
Based on these results, ENMAX earned the 2004 Utility Automation & Engineering T&D Automation Project of the Year Award. The project was chosen based on its size and scope, and the reliability improvements achieved as a result of the Phase I implementation.
Phase II is now underway and includes ten more feeders on the 13.2-kV system. In four years, the completed project will include about 200 automated switches on 80 distribution feeders — one-third of the ENMAX distribution feeders.