Real-time monitoring of distribution systems: Brazilian experience

Abstract

The objective of this chapter is to share the valuable experiences of COPEL, a Brazilian electricity utility, by providing new insights and the challenges faced during the development of the Project of Research and Development (R&D) of Brazilian Electricity Regulatory Agency number 2866-0271/2013.This R&D project resulted in the development and implementation of a (i) service restoration software (SRS) and (ii) real-time monitoring tool (RTMT) to provide better quality load values to characterize the pre-fault steady-state condition for the execution of that SRS.The focus of this chapter is the RTMT which will be presented in detail together with in-field verification in a single distribution feeder of Londrina City, in Brazil, to evaluate the accuracy of the estimated load. This feeder is responsible for the energy supply of 7,305 consumers, with 560 buses (192 with distribution transformers) and 559 branches. Its nominal voltage is 13.8 kV. Also, the application of the developed RTMT in providing the load values for the solution of the service restoration problem in a real large distribution system (DS) is presented. For this application, the processing time required by each step of the RTMT will be presented to show that it satisfies the performance requirements on practically sized DSs. Finally, initial results of two further applications of the RTMT are presented, the first into the DS state estimation problem and the second along with a load nowcasting method.