Dynamic Duo

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With the world’s ener­gy sup­ply increas­ing­ly made up of volatile renew­able sources, elec­tric­i­ty indus­try play­ers across the globe are dis­cov­er­ing that man­ag­ing ener­gy net­works effi­cient­ly is an ever-grow­ing chal­lenge. In an attempt to cut back on cost­ly unsched­uled switch­ing oper­a­tions (redis­patch­ing) in pri­ma­ry sub­sta­tions, many net­work oper­a­tors have begun sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly exert­ing dynam­ic over­loads on equip­ment such as cables and lines, buffer­ing peaks as a result.

“Expos­ing over­head pow­er lines to dynam­ic equip­ment lim­its is already part of dai­ly prac­tice. We can also con­trol oth­er components—like cables, bus­bars, and elec­tri­cal coils—in the same way. In some cas­es, we even ana­lyze them and incor­po­rate them into the net­work secu­ri­ty cal­cu­la­tion,” says Erik Herold, Head of Devel­op­ment with­in the Prod­uct Devel­op­ment divi­sion of PSI Soft­ware AG, a lead­ing provider of sys­tem solu­tions for con­trol cen­ters.


How­ev­er, pow­er trans­form­ers are not yet among the equip­ment that this work focus­es on. Tobias Gru­ber, who is respon­si­ble for digital­iz­ing pow­er trans­form­ers at Rein­hausen, believes that this is pri­mar­i­ly because con­trol­ling them dynam­i­cal­ly is sig­nif­i­cant­ly more com­pli­cat­ed. He ex­plains: “In order to run a trans­former over load, we need a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of its cur­rent state of health—otherwise, there is no way for us to mobi­lize ther­mal reserves safe­ly. The nec­es­sary data is now pro­vid­ed by our ETOS® (Embed­ded Trans­former Op­erating Sys­tem) sys­tem, which enables us to con­trol pow­er trans­form­ers at a much fin­er lev­el.”

Modular Intelligence

ETOS® is the world’s first open operat­ing sys­tem for intel­li­gent trans­form­ers. To help net­work oper­a­tors uti­lize the full poten­tial of trans­form­ers for net­work man­age­ment, PSI Soft­ware AG and Rein­hausen have entered into a tech­no­log­i­cal part­ner­ship. Their spe­cial­ists are cur­rent­ly inte­grat­ing the mod­u­lar sys­tem solu­tion into the con­trol sys­tem soft­ware PSI­con­trol. Erik Herold says: “Since ETOS is based on open stan­dards through­out, it can be inte­grat­ed very effi­cient­ly.”

tart­ing in 2020, all PSI custom­ers will then have the abil­i­ty to con­trol the over­load capa­bil­i­ty of their trans­form­ers over a 24-hour peri­od using fore­cast data (relat­ing to wea­ther and net­work uti­liza­tion) and sta­tus data. ETOS® even makes it pos­si­ble to con­trol cool­ing sys­tems intel­li­gent­ly as a pre­ven­ta­tive means of pre-cool­ing trans­form­ers.

“Since ETOS is based on open stan­dards through­out, it can be inte­grat­ed very effi­cient­ly.”Erik Herold, Head of Devel­op­ment
with­in the Prod­uct Devel­op­ment divi­sion of PSI Soft­ware AG

Erik Herold from PSI Soft­ware AG sees yet more ben­e­fits in link­ing the con­trol sys­tem soft­ware with ETOS®: “Not only will it increase net­work uti­liza­tion, but it will also make it pos­si­ble for us to han­dle trans­former equip­ment more con­sid­er­ate­ly.”

Empha­siz­ing these thoughts, Tobias Gru­ber from Rein­hausen says: “ETOS® gives asset man­agers a much more pre­cise basis for mak­ing deci­sions about how to use their equip­ment because load-flow man­age­ment, state of health, and ser­vice life are inex­tri­ca­bly linked in a trans­former.”

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YOUR CONTACT

Would you like to know more about the dig­i­tal­iza­tion of trans­form­ers?
Tobias Gru­ber is hap­py to advise you fur­ther:
t.gruber@reinhausen.com