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NETWORK / 23 / MAY 2018 will blow to stop excessive dam- age to the cable. Twenty or 30 customers could be affected." He says that historically the network operators, alerted by their customers, would send an engineer to work out which fuse had blown and replace it. "That might restore power but it doesn't get to the heart of the problem," says Rodgers. "The heat from the fault can evaporate moisture from the ca - ble, the power goes back on, but a few weeks later you get heavy rain and the power goes again. You get an intermittent fault." A big issue, he says, is that although the operators can tell there is damage that needs repairing to stop the fault com - ing back, there is no easy way of knowing where that damage is. The firm supplies an auto- recloser – which effectively switches the network off and on again in the event of a fault – enabled with the ability to com - municate information on when it has operated and the results. Data from auto-reclosers can be uploaded to the internet so users can log in and get a picture of network faults. Us - ing information captured from device operations, the firm has developed location algorithms to work out how far from a sub - station a fault is likely to have occurred. It also has a fault assistance centre that can send this loca - tion intelligence to operators and their engineers. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks uses a type of auto-recloser from Kelvatek known as a Bidoyng as the first step in locating network faults. The technology solution recently won the Queen's Award for Enterprise. "We get problems on the high voltage network but this is monitored from a control room, alarmed, it's visible and tech - nology can pinpoint problems quite quickly," says SSE perfor- mance manager Kevin Dennis. "The low voltage network is not monitored in the same way and historically we have been reli - ant on customers notifying us." location. The firm also invested more than £250,000 last year on hand-held thermal imaging cameras that look for hot-spots from a fault. Technology is emerging from a variety of sources to aid fault detection. IT infrastructure monitoring firm Paessler is talking to power firms about the potential of sensors on the built environment to help maintain supplies. Paessler systems engineer Simon Bell says the power net - work is becoming more heavily instrumented. "Paessler is moving into the internet of things in a big way," he says. "We are getting useful intelligence from items such as switching gear or transform- ers that are not traditional IT stuff; we have the capabilities to retrieve that data to give power line engineers the same insight as IT engineers." He says power network operators should be considering using open-protocol sensors on their physical assets to boost their usefulness. "The more sensors are on physical devices, the more chance there is of picking up data to indicate problems on their way on the network." Rodgers says detection tech - nology will continue to evolve and adds that predicting and solving capacity issues could also help keep the lights on by preventing certain faults from occurring. "Electric vehicles can cause problems with capacity on the low-voltage network," he says. "We are looking at machine learning and artificial intel - ligence techniques to see what more value we can release from the data we capture." Understanding the nature of demand on the network can allow – for example – technol - ogy to physically connect supply areas to match demand. "Commercial areas' electric- ity levels start to go to low levels from about 6pm when residen- tial areas' get high. So we can connect them and effectively find them extra power." He says that, without useful information on location, the firm was o—en only in a position to change a fuse and walk away. "Things have changed since 2015 when new equipment emerged on the market," says Dennis. "The Bidoyngs are retrofit devices with two fuses – so there is a back-up fuse to restore power – and also we get information on the fault location. We replace the blown fuse and use other technol - ogy to repair the fault." Providing a snapshot SSE receives a snapshot map marked where the fault is believed to be and a tolerance level stated of how accurate that location is. Cable-sniffers are used on probes through precision holes in the pavement to confirm the Engineers working on overhead lines. A Bidoyng being installed.