Emerging Concepts in Preventive Maintenance

Abu Bakar Abid Jathol

Power system market is shifted from technical to economic driving factors. The
utilities that own and operate the power distribution systems now face various market
requirements. On the one hand, customers are paying for a service and the authorities
are imposing regulation, supervision, and compensation depending on the degree to
which contractual and other obligations are fulfilled. On the other hand, utilities must
ensure that their expenditure is cost effective. This means that electricity utilities must
satisfy quantitative reliability requirements while at the same time minimizing their
costs. One predominant expense for a utility is the cost of maintaining system assets.
There are two main types of maintenance first is breakdown maintenance which is
waiting until the equipment fails before maintenance or service. Second type is
preventive maintenance, periodically inspecting, servicing, cleaning or replacing parts
to prevent sudden failure, predictive online monitoring of equipment in order to use
important or expensive parts to the extent of their serviceable life.

As the electric power grid continues to expand and as transmission lines are pushed to
their operating limits, the dynamic operation of the power system has become more of
a concern and has become more difficult to accurately model. In addition, the ability
to affect real-time system control is developing into the need to prevent wide scale
cascading outages. Blackout prevention / mitigation and power system security are the
order of the day. Managing congestion, balancing load and on-line generation,
maintaining spinning reserve capacity margins, and managing reactive power support
through reliable real-time data are some of the key elements of successful power
system operation. The Multilin N60 network stability and synchrophasor
measurement system is a flexible device intended for the development of load
shedding, remedial action, special protection schemes and wide area monitoring and
control. Special protection schemes are unique to each installation and are carefully
matched to a given system topology, operating practices and system protection
philosophies of a given utility. The N60 provides an exceptionally flexible platform to
easily integrate and facilitate the specific special protection schemes needed for a
wide range of applications. As part of the UR family of Protection and Control
devices, the Multilin N60 Network Stability and Security System offer a high degree
of modularity in its design and functionality, providing superior performance while
meeting the toughest requirements of the marketplace. As an advanced Synchrophasor
Measurement device, the N60 supports wide area monitoring and other grid
modernization applications. Figure 1 explains wide are monitoring concept for three
EHV substations. Substations 1 to 3 are providing power to load of different groups of
substations at different voltage levels. If any line feeding power to the substations is
out of service it is wide area monitoring equipment’s job to evaluate that which load
is to be disconnected in order to keep power system in stable operating condition.
Similarly, if load is switched off or taken out of the system wide area management
system will access the circumstances and make a decision that which generation
source is to be taken out of system in order to maintain the system stability.
 Figure 1: Wide Area Monitoring System Block Diagram

The concept of using phasors to describe power system operating quantities dates
back to Charles Proteus Steinmetz's paper on mathematical techniques for analyzing
AC networks. More recently, Steinmetz's technique of phasor calculation has evolved
into the calculation of real-time phasor measurements synchronized to an absolute
time reference known as \Synchronized Phasor Measurement" or "Synchrophasors".
A synchrophasor is a time-synchronized number that represent both the magnitude
and phase angle of the sine waves found in electricity, and are time-synchronized for
accuracy. Essentially at each point of measurement there is a clock. These clocks are
all synchronized to the same source, usually an atomic or GPS clock of some kind.
The N60 is also a source of synchronized phasor measurements known as
synchrophasors. The N60 meets all and exceeds many of the requirements of the
IEEE C37.118 synchrophasors for power systems standard. The N60 can
simultaneously stream P and M class synchrophasors over its Ethernet ports at
configurable discrete rates of 1 to 120 frames per second. In addition to streaming
synchrophasors, the N60 can be controlled through programmable triggers to store
snapshot records of synchrophasor data in the 12MB of onboard memory.

Phasor data and applications are valuable for grid reliability because they give grid
operators and planners unprecedented insight into what is happening on the grid at
high resolution, over a wide area in time synchronized mode, and where needed, in
real-time. It is apparent that the present trend of load growth outstripping transmission
will continue for the foreseeable future. In order to maintain power system stability
over the ensemble of contingencies introduced by this load/transmission imbalance,
protection engineers are challenged to find alternative solutions such as remedial
action scheme to fill the gaps. A set of technologies exist to meet the needs for today
and developments are progressing that promise to bring more sophisticated tools to
affect better control over the massive machine known as the Electric Power Grid.