Abstract
In most developing countries, huge parts of the electric power grid are not monitored making it difficult for the service provider to determine when there is a power failure in the electric grid, especially if the power failure occurs in the Low Voltage level. Clients usually have to call and inform the utility’s customer service centre to report a power failure. However, this system of addressing power outages is not very effective and usually results in long durations of system interruptions. This paper proposes a cloud based power failure sensing system to enable automatic power failure sensing and reporting as well as monitoring of the low voltage power network in Zambia, a developing country in Southern Africa. A baseline study was conducted to determine the challenges faced by both the electric power utility company called Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation (ZESCO) and the electricity consumers in the current power failure reporting management model. The results from the baseline study indicate that challenges are being faced by electricity consumers when it comes to reporting power failures. These include failure to get through to the customer call centre due to constantly engaged lines, unanswered calls, failed calls and network failure. The challenge faced by the electricity service provider is the inability to attend to all the customers through the call centre as customer calls are rejected due to limited Call Centre system resources. To address these challenges the proposed cloud based power failure sensor model made use of a Voltage sensor circuit, Arduino Microcontroller board, SIM808 GSM/GPRS/GPS module, cloud architecture, Web Application and Google Map API. Results from the proposed model show improved reporting time, location information and quick response to power failures.
Highlights
Electrical power systems are extremely huge and complex networks
The corporation had witnessed growth of about 400 % between 2000 and 2019, with the customer base increasing from 200,000 in the year 2000, to about 900,000 in the year 2018 and 1,000,000 customers in 2019 [9] .With Zambia being part of the sub Saharan African countries which have a total duration of outages averaging approximately 800 hours a year [10], it is important that reliable and efficient automatic power failure-sensing systems be put in place to reduce on outage durations as well as ensure customer satisfaction
The proposed prototype was developed to show as proof of concept of how the fully implemented system would work to alleviate the challenges currently faced by Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation (ZESCO) and the electricity clients
Summary
Electrical power systems are extremely huge and complex networks. Such electric power systems provide a secondary source of energy essential to meeting man’s needs, improve living standards and boost socio-economic development [1] [2]. The corporation had witnessed growth of about 400 % between 2000 and 2019, with the customer base increasing from 200,000 in the year 2000, to about 900,000 in the year 2018 and 1,000,000 customers in 2019 [9] .With Zambia being part of the sub Saharan African countries which have a total duration of outages averaging approximately 800 hours a year [10], it is important that reliable and efficient automatic power failure-sensing systems be put in place to reduce on outage durations as well as ensure customer satisfaction This will ensure adequate, reliable and efficient electricity supply
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