Muonion Sähköosuuskunta operates in a challenging environment in Finnish Lapland north of the Arctic Circle. Terrain is rough and is surrounded by fells. During winter, the temperature can drop to 20 degrees below zero Celsius.
Challenging conditions have made it extra difficult to find faults quickly. In these extreme conditions even short outages can cause big problems. Goal was to improve grid resiliency and make better and more informed decisions based on the improved monitoring capability.
After Safegrid´s system was introduced it proved to be useful right away. Soon after Safegrid´s solution was commissioned, a permanent fault occurred on their network. A fault tripped customer’s relay protection, causing an outage. The fault remained permanent even after a new delayed reclosing event and the protection relays tripped again.
For both of the tripping events, Safegrid pointed fault location to the same location. With this information Rovakaira’s Operations Manager Timo Rauhala knew what to do. He sent a patrol to the field in the area pinpointed by Safegrid. They soon discovered a tree hanging on the overhead line. Now that the fault was quickly found they also cleared it promptly. As a result in this particular case, around 3 hours of fault searching time was saved and only two reclosing events were needed.
Safegrid´s solution helped Muonion Sähköosuuskunta achieve following improvements:
- Outage time was reduced by 50%
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Reduced the number of reclosing events
“Safegrid has helped us to locate faults faster, reduce the amount of reclosing events, and shorten outage times” – Timo Rauhala, Operations Manager