Improving Reliability for Customers

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Customized reliability investigations and solutions

Utilities face growing pressure to reduce costs while maintaining or improving reliability. In some jurisdictions, capital or operating expenditures required to maintain reliability must be justified to regulators. The majority of power interruptions that directly affect utility customers and reliability indices occur on Distribution Systems.

Distribution System components are in close proximity to human activity making outages due to dig-ins, pole impact accidents, or trees encroaching on lines prevalent. Distribution components can also be geographically widespread, leading to long restoration times and extended outages.

General studies of Distribution reliability often lack value because outage causes vary between utilities, and even between areas for the same utility. Solutions for one area may not be applicable to another locale. Reliability investigations and remedies must be customized to meet individual situations.

Cost-effective options

Kinectrics can conduct classical reliability analysis of Distribution Systems. Furthermore, we can accurately identify root causes of reliability problems and provide utilities with cost-effective options for improving reliability and decreasing capital and operation costs. Kinectrics’ Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analyses can be used to achieve optimal maintenance scheduling and minimize maintenance cost. Additional benefits gained by utilities include meeting regulatory requirements and improving relations with customers.

Essential steps

Typically, several steps are undertaken to properly assess Distribution Reliability and implement effective actions to reduce outage frequency and duration:

Determine existing reliability

Evaluate present utility reliability and compare to requirements of regulators, customers, internal standards, and other utilities to determine if problems exist and if they are system-wide or local. Local failure rates are determined to identify pockets of poorest reliability.

Calculate expected reliability

• A key step, because if existing reliability is better than expected reliability, the recommended actions will be very different than when the actual reliability is worse than expected.

Determine outage causes in the area of study

• Kinectrics can conduct a study of existing databases, work orders, and trouble sheets. This could include interviews with maintainers to ascertain the causes of outages.

Examine system design

• Kinectrics reviews line, protection, and grounding design for potential reliability improvements.

• Kinectrics will review maintenance practices such as tree-trimming, condition-monitoring, crew locations and call out times.

Recommend solutions

• Kinectrics will recommend prioritized reliability improvement solutions based on cost-effectiveness.

Kinectrics' staff has experience in all of these areas, and can address gaps where client expertise or resources are insufficient to carry out all of these steps. We customize our databases of component failure rates and outage causes to accurately reflect local conditions. Numerical analysis is completed with Kinectrics software using specialized techniques.

Component failure investigation

Kinectrics also has experience completing detailed components failure investigations. If a utility is experiencing multiple cable, insulator, or fuse failures, Kinectrics can examine several failed samples and often determine the cause of the problem. Problems may be due to manufacturing defects, installation problems, or unusual operating stress, such as transients or overload. Kinectrics is often called in as an authoritative third party to mediate disputes between manufacturers and utilities.

Fully equipped testing laboratories

Kinectrics offers a fully equipped High Voltage and High Current laboratories for equipment testing to determine expected performance. For example, components can be subjected to accelerated aging tests for tracking resistance, or cable water treeing. Different manufacturer equipment can be compared or tested to determine interaction results. For instance, a variety of underground cable elbows and bushings can be mated for testing. Load-breaking performance may be superior in some combinations.

Proven expertise and experience

Kinectrics has supplied quality Distribution services to power utilities for over 25 years. Our experience includes numerous studies and component failure analysis for many utilities. Kinectrics has also performed extensive component testing through the Canadian Electrical Association.

For more information, contact:

Stephen Cress, 416.207.6557, stephen.cress@kinectrics.com