In collaboration with:
The project’s aim was to enhance understanding of the substation environments. A secondary aim was to establish a relationship between local meteorological conditions and environmental conditions within primary substation buildings.
Currently there is no or limited monitoring of the environmental conditions inside primary substations. The project explored the options for monitoring the environmental conditions inside selected substations.
Project objective
The objective was to determine if any concerning environmental conditions exist in the selected substations and whether the conditions could be inferred from local MET stations where environmental data is readily available.
Delivery
The project initially called for a desk based analysis of equipment to be deployed in the selected substations. The project then moved into a deployment phase where the selected monitoring solution was deployed in the selected substations. The final stage of the project was data processing, analysis and final reporting activities. The project made use of a researcher at PNDC and University of Strathclyde support for data processing/analysis.
The deliverables of the project includes:
Interim report including information about selected substations and available commercial tools, as well as experimental protocol
Installation of identified monitoring solutions
Validation of captured data by monitoring equipment
Database of substation environmental measurements
Final report containing the information gathered during the project and the implications of the data gathered for this project
Outcomes & Impact
The project brings confidence to the DNO partners that there were no significant environmental issues in the substations monitored.
Increases understanding in the effects of current environmental controls and how environmental controls can be used in the future.
The project has highlighted the challenges in deploying monitoring equipment in a wide range of substation buildings.
Longer-term impact:
The project provides a basis for data and models to enable further work to be completed in this area (service cutout environments, linkboxes etc). There are undoubtedly further opportunities for insightful analysis on the available data sets.
Expansion of project leanings beyond substations to consider/identify environments of concern.
Next Steps
The project has highlighted the challenges around inferring/predicting the environmental conditions in a fleet of substations from local MET measurements and the immediate focus of further work would be in this area.
Get in touch
PNDC project lead: Eddie Corr .
For further information on this case study or to discuss collaborative opportunities, please get in touch.
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