S&C Electric Company, a smart grid leader shaping the future of power delivery, has announced it helped utilities avoid more than 2.4 billion customer-outage minutes in 2017. The total demonstrates how S&C’s grid-reliability solutions have reduced the duration and frequency of power outages for utility customers around the world over the past year.
Key findings from the S&C reliability report include:
• 25% of companies experience power outages at least once a month.
• 71% of commercial/industrial customers own or plan to develop alternative energy sources, supplementing their current provider’s generation and power reliability.
• 67% of commercial/industrial customers believe major events (weather and generation loss) and outages lasting less than five minutes, which aren’t currently tracked by the industry, should be factored into reliability measurements. “While research shows grid reliability is improving, the customer’s perspective isn’t always accounted for,” said Edmonds. “What we learned through this research is that customers continue to see significant impacts from power outages, and they want to raise the bar for how power reliability is measured.” Key findings will be shared with S&C customers and visitors at the 2018 DistribuTECH Conference & Exhibition in San Antonio. The full report will be made available to the public following DistribuTECH at sandc.com/reliability. S&C will also debut a variety of new innovations at DistribuTECH 2018 that will help utilities better understand rising customer expectations and solutions that can address them. These launches include:
• The S&C Microgrid Experience, a three-dimensional demonstration that allows visitors to better understand how an S&C microgrid brings together distributed energy resources, energy storage, and intelligence to keep the lights on for customers in a variety of situations, and how microgrid controls ensure an adaptable, cyber-secure system.
• The new addition of an external trip feature to S&C’s IntelliRupter® PulseCloser® Fault Interrupter. This new feature enables utilities to use S&C’s PulseClosing® Technology instead of traditional reclosers in substations to protect expensive power transformers.
• A cellular-based communication option for the S&C TripSaver® II Cutout-Mounted Recloser. This new model combines advanced communications capabilities without the need of a gateway, allowing customers to apply the TripSaver II recloser in new applications that reduce outages on lateral lines.
Leave a Reply