Parikkalan Valo is a long established utility company in Eastern Finland. They have been in operation since 1936. They currently serve around 10 000 customers and their distribution network is approximately 2700 km.
Parikkalan Valo wanted to enhance their fault finding and organize repair works faster. Remote and difficult terrain has been a challenge for them in the past, but with the help of Safegrid´s Intelligent Grid System they can now tackle these problems more efficiently.
Already during the commissioning project the benefits were swiftly realised. Several successfully located faults during the project phase made Parikkalan Valo trust the system right away.
One of these events occurred when the customer´s control room received an alert for a 2-phase short circuit in one of their feeders. The existing distribution management system was not able to locate the fault because of the multi-branch network. This was not a problem for the Safegrid IGS-system as it was able to point out a single short circuit location.
As the acting supervisor already trusted the system, he decided to send a field patrol to the shown location.
Soon after arriving on the spot, the team discovered a tree hanging on the lines nearby. The improved fault locating helped to dispatch the field team faster and they found the fault on the marked location. This helped to reduce outage time almost in half when compared to Parikkalan Valo’s average fault repair times.
Safegrid´s solution helped Parikkalan Valo achieve following improvements:
- Improved fault isolation
- Faster resource allocation
- Outage time -45%
“Safegrid has enabled us to locate and isolate faults faster in our network. This had led to faster repair and restoration times ” Vesa Naukkarinen, Planning Manager
