Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/748539
NETWORK / 33 / NOVEMBER 2016 Other drivers for adoption were there in the opportunity to reduce fault level investment. In the past, as supply has risen, a lot of money has had to be spent on increasing the capacity of breakers and so on. With clever smart grid techniques, it is possible to mitigate a lot of that. It is also possible to use a lot of the information you get from NMS to make better decisions about replacing assets. We also see that the new NMS will help improve reliability – we have a good track record in this area but the new system will take us to the next level. With the new NMS we are looking to enhance the network automation we are already doing at a high voltage level by employing much more advanced algorithms. But we are also extending these techniques deeply into the low voltage network – we aim to have the entire low voltage network connected to the system. Pushing the limits On an operational level the NMS will also enable process improvement in communications between control room and field force and will change the way we manage outages. We are very proud of our current NMS – or control room management system – which we have developed in house over 15 years. But we are coming up against challenges with it. Primarily, this is because it is based on a connected model, there is no electrical model inside it, so we have really pushed the limits of what we can do. A lot of approaches to smart grids depend on knowing the loads; the current down various feeders. An NMS also needs to let us forecast, look ahead and state estimates on what's happening. The current system doesn't let us do that. Also, we have been successful carrying out trials with projects such as Class, Capacity 2 Customers (C2C), and Smart Street; but actually rolling these out at a production level is currently very difficult. We've got a bottleneck and we need to rollout. The new NMS brings this all together in an integrated way and it is scalable too. This is important because as you start to rollout smart grid techniques for the LV network, the number of devices out there – remote measuring points and switching devices – gets really, really big. We just couldn't handle it with our current system. Low risk programme We're about halfway through the programme to implement the new NMS – it's a three-year project. We're releasing it in three main stages, very much geared towards de-risking the programme. The first release is the SCADA release – the bit that really communicates from the remote terminal units out in the field, to the centre. The next release is what we call FLISR, which is fault location, isolation and service restoration. This is all about being able to get customer supplies back on if there's a fault. We're going to introduce this in a "listening phase" so we can compare the new system with our old CRMS and ensure we have achieved the necessary improvements before we switch over. The final release is the outage management system. When customers go off supply, all the inferencing about where the fault is and which crews to send is looked a˜er here. The system also deals with some further smart grid functionality such as C2C. It's very nice to have been able to de-risk the programme by installing chunks of functionality in a staged way. In the same way, when future projects come along, we will be able to slide those in. Indeed, we are already thinking about putting an intermediate release into the current programme to incorporate functionality from our Class project. This is very exciting. In terms of this all running smoothly and getting where we want to get to, it has been essential that we are sure we have a shared vison with our colleagues at Schneider. Our roadmap and theirs needs to be well aligned. That is important because this is a long- term platform for our future development. It's also helpful to know that we have a really strong team supporting us at Schneider. The data team over in Novosad (Hungary) is about 1,000-strong, and that is key because a project like this is long and challenging, and there's a lot of hard work involved. We feel we've got a good team supporting us. N NMS beNefitS • Reduce investment in network reinforcement by greater network utilisation • Reduce fault level investment by controlling network fault levels • Reduce investment in asset replacement through improved asset information • Network optimisation – for example, minimising losses, voltage control • Operational process performance improvements in outage and data management functions Improvements in customer service: • Enhanced automatic fault restoration • Faster LV supply restoration through the use of smart meter information • Improved customer information updates from the field • Enhanced storm management capabilities NMS Contract Schneider Electric selectedto provide newNMS Release1 DesignSCADA and FLISRcomplete Release 1bFLISR TestingofnewARS replacement Release 1aSCADA Softgo-live RTUMigration Transferall PrimaryRTU's fromCRMS SCADAtoNMS SCADA CLASS2 Deploymentof CLASStoall Primary substations Release 1bFLISR FLISR working in "monitoring mode" Release2OMS TMSReplacement NMSCutover Transfertonew NMS–switch offCRMS CRMIntegration OMSintegrationto CRMCustomercall inputtoOMS TRS LargeArea Restoration for132kV& 33kVfaults Dec 2014 Nov 2015 May 2016 Sep 2016 2017 2018 FLISR Go livedate NMSTimeline