Electrical Power Substation Energy Audit And The Cost- Benefit Analysis Of Automating Switching Operations During Outages At The Kenya Power Company Limited.

Abstract

Substation automation has, its prime objective, the need to satisfy the increasingly demanding requirements of the power systems concerned. The most important requirement is to ensure that the power system, as a whole, is operated and controlled in the most effective, secure and economic manner possible. In High Voltage (HV) and Extra HV substations, decisions must be taken quickly and safely to achieve rapid restoration of supply and speedy return to normal operating conditions following a substation equipment fault or other substation abnormality [50]. The project intended to explore interactive techniques for substation automation by describing models and computational techniques that have been developed to model substation configuration and detect the available restoration operations following a fault in a substation equipment. These techniques should recognize the existing, at the time of fault, operational configuration of the substation by inputting the operating states of the breakers and isolators. Simulation and especially computer simulation is a basic tool since it enables engineers to understand how systems work without actually needing to see them. They can learn how they work in different circumstances and optimize their design with considerably less cost in terms of time and money than if they had to carry out tests on a physical system. There is a wide range of commercial brands on the market offering products for electrical simulation. These are powerful tools, but require the engineer to have a perfect knowledge of the electrical field. Energy efficiency brings health, productivity, safety, comfort and savings to consumers and beneficiaries, as well as local and global environmental benefits. This project intended to study and explore the modelling of Intelligent Electronic Device (IED). These configurable IED models allow to easily build Substation Automation System (SAS) network model with different topologies for all kinds of substations so that the dynamic performance issues could be studied during the planning stage and network performance problem could be caught ahead of the deployment stage [50]. An example of using models to construct Substation Automation System network as well as the network performance simulation results was considered in this project.