This week, SSS was in San Antonio at the American Public Power Association’s Engineering & Operations Vendor Expo. Over the 3-day event, we dove into sessions on communication and control, environment, generation and fuels, safety, transmission and distribution, system planning, and supply management. The sessions on Distribution Automation (DA) and IoT network management were particularly exciting.
An automated and updated grid is the best way for power utilities to save money and better serve their customers. The session on DA looked at how to get fault circuit interrupters online to find the faults faster and restore power to customers. The IoT network management session featured experts from Riverside, California and Ingenu. Ingenu is a newer company that connects utilities to the outside world and makes them “smart.” Riverside effectively utilized this company for an AMI solution as well as connecting their fault interrupters on the grid. Ultimately participants learned how to avoid truck rolls to find the fault in the line. With Distribution Automation you can see where the fault is between two switches. It also saves the utility money and ideally passes that savings onto the customer.