Multi-Million Pound Investment by SP Energy Networks Leads to Significant Cost Savings and Improved Network Performance
In line with the company’s strategy to offer the best possible customer service and provide value for money to customers through innovation, SP Energy Networks (SPEN) is installing eMS sub.net monitors across its network of primary substations.
Nationwide, DNOs are faced with the challenge of reducing outage times whilst at the same time reducing asset risk and the sub.net monitor helps SPEN to tackle both these issues. The sub.net monitor records and analyses fault events and links to the network map so that fault locations are identified quickly and repair crews can be dispatched to the most appropriate point on the network to locate and isolate the fault and restore customers.
The timely communication of this information helps to improve restoration and repair times.
Not only will this investment from SP Energy Networks have a positive effect for the end customer with fault restoration times improving, there is also a significant business case to be made as the improvements have exceeded SPEN’s return on investment requirements. To date, SPEN has been able to change maintenance policy and reduce breaker maintenance costs through remote breaker testing thanks to the sub.net monitor. The early detection of faulty breakers has led to significant financial benefits for SP Energy Networks with estimated savings of £500k from the detection of three slow breakers[1].
Additional benefits of the monitors such as power quality reports and network visibility also have a positive impact on customer service. Dave Courtney, Technical Director at eMS says, “SPEN has demonstrated the benefits of our fault location and asset monitoring functions. These same benefits are available to all network operators enabling them to reduce costs and improve the quality of service to their customers”
Jim Livie, Power Quality Engineer from SP Energy Networks evaluates the benefits of the sub.net monitors as follows, “With our enhanced monitoring solution provided by eMS we are able to significantly reduce our asset risk from faulty breakers. By using the sub.net monitor our team has all the information they need to process actual or transient faults much faster through automatic detection, which has reduced our maintenance costs and enhanced our service provision for the customer.”
[1] Further information can be found on Page 14 of this report http://www.smarternetworks.org/Files/Subnet_Monitoring_130422133347.pdf