Tunturiverkko is the Northernmost utility in Finland, covering over 7% of Finnish territory in Lapland’s arctic areas. With over 2 000 km of network in the challenging Arctic environment, with long feeder spans, their need was to improve predictive maintenance capabilities to prevent faults whenever possible.
Tunturiverkko had been suffering from outages due to various component failures. Most common being overhead line insulator breakdowns. To tackle these problems, Safegrid system was employed to detect possible failures as a preventive measure.
As a first result, the Safegrid Intelligent Grid System successfully located three separate insulator failures in a single week’s time. The locations were pointed out with heatmaps, generated by partial discharge 24/7 online monitoring.
The cracked insulators were found almost immediately after inspecting the locations on site. Replacing the broken insulators in a controlled manner before their breakdown has enabled considerable cost savings and reduced customer outages. The accuracy and speed to find the faults has been unprecedented.
With Safegrid’s solution Tunturiverkko achieved:
- Unprecedented ability to locate and prevents faults before they occur
- 40 000 € savings in a week for a single feeder
“Safegrid has helped us to locate and prevent component failures that we haven’t been effectively able to prevent. This has enabled considerable cost savings due to the predictive maintenance capabilities” Heija Länsman, Service Manager