04/20/2018
AriesPro Recognized in T & D world for improving energy efficiency
A utilities transform their business models through the investment of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), smart grid and similar technologies, the ability to collect, store and analyze detailed consumer and operational data becomes a critical competitive differentiator. South River Electric Membership Corp. (SREMC), located in Dunn, North Carolina, U.S., employs data analytics from AriesPro to achieve system loss reduction and energy efficiency. This is the first part of SREMC’s multiphase project to bring data-driven solutions to its business.
Data Analytics
As a key systems integrator and data analytics company, specializing in smart grid, AMI, social media mobile solutions and unified cloud solutions for utilities, AriesPro integrates vital information stored in operational technologies (such as AMI) and builds near-real-time predictive analytics to make day-to-day informed decisions for engineering, operations and other departments at an enterprise level.
Excelling in the latest smart technologies, AriesPro is redefining data analytics for South River EMC to provide a wide range of benefits:
- Reduce energy theft/diversion by analyzing distribution systems.
- Reduce transmission, substation and distribution losses by pinpointing where the greatest losses are in the electric system.
- Reduce energy losses by identifying where and when equipment downtime and power failures can expectedly occur.
- Improve asset utilization and reduce ancillary service cost by automating voltage and VAR control, real-time load measurement/management, and optimizing customer energy use.
- Enhance unified outage analytics to promote operational efficiencies and improve reliability indices.
- Predict consumer behavior and learn which customers are expected to respond to energy-conservation and demand-reduction incentives.
Loss Identification
At SREMC, phase I of this project included partnering with AriesPro to structure the data integration utility warehouse and develop reporting for distribution loss reduction, conservation voltage reduction (CVR) analysis, transformer load analysis and nontechnical loss evaluation. After the go-live date was achieved and data validation was completed, SREMC began the initial stages of analysis into distribution system losses.
Overall system savings can be calculated to determine potential annual savings. In this case, theoretically speaking, if all station losses presently above 5% were reduced to the target loss, annual savings would be 12,940 MWh with a dollar savings of $727,000. These savings represent roughly a 1.55% reduction in SREMC’s total distribution system losses. The amount of time and modeling required to perform loss-reduction studies and economic evaluations to achieve this 1.55% reduction in losses can be extensive.
The Future Is Now
At South River EMC, the initial source of system loss data did not provide the granularity needed to identify high-loss areas of the system. Hence, SREMC was at a loss about the losses. The addition of data-driven analytics through AriesPro has afforded the opportunity to drive costs out of the business while embedding efficiencies in electric system design and operations. Additional phases of this project will migrate other aspects of the business into the utility data warehouse and will help drive demand response, outage management and other distribution management initiatives. At South River EMC, data analytics is not the future, it’s now.