Electricity producers, distributors, and consumers all benefit when they can rely on resilient infrastructure. Safegrid is enabling that resilience with the release of its Smart Fault Prediction suite, a game-changing set of applications designed to help grid operators shift from reactive fault correction to proactive fault prevention.
Safegrid’s patented and patent-pending technology equips them to pinpoint and predict faults with greater speed and precision than ever before.
Established in 2019, the company has already become a rapidly-growing leader in the electrical grid monitoring industry, helping 46 companies across North America, Europe, Africa and Asia maintain rock-solid networks while reducing maintenance costs.
Now Safegrid is proud to announce the first of its tools in the Smart Fault Prediction family, which the company will unveil in depth to more than 17,000 utility-industry professionals on 26-29 February at the Distributech International conference, to be held in Orlando, Florida. This tool was crafted specifically for detecting common precursor phenomena indicating future faults. With it, Smart Fault Prediction complements Safegrid’s advanced Smart Fault Location capabilities by pinpointing signs of trouble in distribution networks before outages can occur.
While these goals are ambitious, the product has already proved itself through extensive testing in demanding real-world conditions. One trial user was Randolph EMC, a co-operative serving more than 30,000 customers in the US state of North Carolina. By implementing Smart Fault Prediction in conjunction with Safegrid’s cloud-based platform GridGuardian, the utility company sought to find and defuse all the ‘ticking time bombs’ buried within 7,081 km (4,400 miles) of lines. Improvements to SAIDI and other interruption-time metrics attest to the success of this endeavor to solve problems preemptively.
Among many concrete results listed by Randolph, their personnel are saving some 500 utility co-operative members from a multi-hour power cut by finding a leaking surge arrester in a network section affected by partial discharges and, shortly thereafter, precluding 45,000 customer interruption minutes. Decision-makers with Randolph EMC concluded that the tool gave them unprecedented ‘visibility for problems we have known to be out there but hadn’t been able to locate proactively’.
The Smart Fault Prediction suite enhances Safegrid’s powerful array of easily deployed solutions for 24/7 grid monitoring and analytics.
Further information on Safegrid is available at www.safegrid.io