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Improving Efficiency and Reliability with Distribution Automation
Improving efficiency and reliability of the distribution network remains a critical goal for many utilities. Two-way communications with the protection and control devices on the distribution portion of the smart grid is fundamental to achieving those energy efficiency and reliability goals.
Distribution Automation (DA) devices themselves are evolving to be more robust and reliable, offer higher computing power, and act as a source of planning data. And given utilities’ continual focus on improving energy efficiency and power reliability, matching these improvements with real-time communications is key.
The Silver Spring family of bridges relay information between SCADA and reclosers, sectionalizers, feeder switches, capacitor banks and controllers, transformers, and voltage regulators. Understanding the status of these devices in real time enables much faster outage detection and notification and improves fault location and isolation. It also increases energy efficiency through better capacitor and voltage control and improved asset management.
The Silver Spring Smart Energy Platform is architected to support the high polling rates, low latency, and traffic prioritization needed to serve Distribution Automation communications. The smart grid network also offers true peer-to-peer capabilities to be deployed in teaming mode, and dynamic and static routing ensure reliable communications.
Utilities have the choice to deploy a mixed AMI/DA network or totally separate infrastructure for the two applications. In a mixed deployment, the utility can leverage some network components to serve both the advanced metering and DA networks but retain logical separation at the operation level.
With Silver Spring’s sophisticated DA offering, smart utility networks can also prepare to support new energy devices and services, such as microgrids, distributed generation, and electric vehicles.
