A new monitoring architecture for distribution feeder health monitoring, asset management, and real-time situational awareness

Delivering reliable service requires satisfactory operation of numerous line components, spanning significant geographical areas and subject to environmental, electrical, and mechanical stresses, plus normal aging. Conventional reliability practices use periodic maintenance to minimize failures, coupled with rapid restoration procedures when outages occur. Reliability statistics have shown little change in decades. Newer technologies can shorten outages, by automatically rerouting service to customers on healthy feeder segments, but they: require redundant paths for power flow; react only after outages occur; and often require communications with pole-mounted switches. Over the past decade, Texas A&M University has demonstrated that electrical waveforms, available via conventional substation-based CTs and PTs, contain evidence of failures, incipient failures, and improper operation of feeder equipment, often well before these conditions escalate and cause outages. This provides the basis for conditioned-based maintenance and outage avoidance. This paper provides examples, from operating feeders, demonstrating some of these advances.