Burlington Hydro has made noteworthy accomplishments in distribution automation, leveraging engineering prowess and advanced equipment such as from our Scada-Mate switching partner, S&C Electric.
S&C Electric Canada Ltd., a worldwide leader in electric power system technologies and services, has worked hand-in-hand with Burlington Hydro in the installation of a cutting-edge deployment of a system viewed as a key building block towards GridSmartCity™.
Phase 1 of the switching automation deployment in the City of Burlington, completed December, 2008, was the first system of its kind in Ontario and one of only two in Canada.
Burlington Hydro’s innovative use of S&C Electric technology to create a ‘Self Healing Grid’ in the heart of the city, which protects the city’s most mission critical assets such as Joseph Brant Hospital, earned them the 2008 Innovation Award for Customer Service from the Electricity Distributors Association (EDA). The system has virtually eliminated outages in the downtown core, and city-wide, overall outages have reduced by 40 percent.
The S&C Electric technology at the heart of the innovation is the IntelliTEAM II®Automatic Feeder Reconfiguration System. Burlington Hydro has now installed 55 S&C Electric Scada Mate switches throughout Burlington which, together with advanced software and telecommunications systems, has improved monitoring, operational effectiveness and service response times to the benefit of all citizens. The most advanced deployment of automation by Burlington Hydro is in the downtown core where the system detects faults and restores power without human intervention. Outages that would have taken one to two hours to find and fix, now are largely restored in seconds. The protected area includes vital community infrastructure and services such as Joseph Brant Hospital, water and wastewater treatment facilities, the Canadian Centre for Inland Waters and other mission critical services.
A GridSmartCity™ initiative is to build on this partnership to expand the use of IntelliTEAM II® and employ new technologies to reduce the extent and duration of service interruptions and speed service restoration for customers throughout Burlington.
Another related initiative will explore the expanded use of sensors, monitors and communications equipment, to evaluate distribution feeder performance, pinpoint outages and enable more precise distribution planning.
