The cost of electricity, quality of delivery, availability and ability to power workforces have a direct impact on the competitiveness of African economies – so the lights need to be kept on.
The energy sector provides the backbone to support nearly all economic activity around the globe, and developing the power sector is vital to ensuring sustainable and inclusive growth in Africa.
Typically, responding to power cuts involves a lengthy process of manually carrying out checks or relying on alarms, but there is now a better way.
An advanced distribution management system (ADMS) can give an at-a-glance view of the entire distribution network in real-time – allowing for rapid response when the power cuts.
PowerOn Advantage
GE’s PowerOn Advantage ADMS, an advanced software technology platform, modernises and gives a new user friendly way of managing the power grid.
Out goes the alarm-based system and in comes the control room where staff have all the data easily accessible at their fingertips.
PowerOn Advantage delivers increased reliability, productivity, and efficiency through a single, modular platform, providing the situational awareness needed to operate a utility’s distribution grid.
This integrated solution helps enable utility operators to optimize their electric distribution assets, workflows and existing infrastructure for advanced grid performance and improved reliability.
Rapid response
When the power goes down, every second counts, and GE believes that getting the lights back on in under three minutes is the sweet spot.
When a fault occurs on the network, GE’s Automated Power Restoration System (APRS) uses telemetered fault detection/location devices to locate the network section containing the fault.
It then analyses the faulted circuit and its neighbouring circuits to determine the size of the outage and spare capacity on potential donor circuits.
Next, the APRS isolates the faulted section and restores power supply upstream and downstream of the isolated section.
With APRS, restorations typically occur within a minute or less of a fault being detected—depending on the utility’s communication infrastructure.
The following video provides more information on GE’s PowerOn Advantage.
