ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Remote 11kV switching?

Hi and welcome Ian!

I'll instantly take the chance to verify the information I have my database: Does Isle of Man use 230/400V with BS1363 plugs?

pauluk - the island has its fair share of thunderstorms, most of them tend to stay just offshore thankfully. Wind is plentiful here, which is nice when you have a traction kite! The map is slightly inaccurate in that it shows the island as being part of the UK, which it is not. The island has its own government (the oldest democracy in the world) and is classed as being part of Great Britain, not the UK, or the European Union come to think of it.

C-H - yes we use the same standards as the UK, but as our Electricity Supply Regs are yet to be updated we officially still use 240/415V although we aim for 230/400V. It gets a little confusing sometimes.....

I figured it might be something like that.

And yes, I noticed the slightly inaccurate labeling on the map. Isn't the IoM officially classed as a British Crown Dependency?

By the way, that map is also inaccurate with the U.K. tags applied to Jersey and Guernsey. They share a similar status in being British territory, but not part of the U.K. or the E.U.

Hi there Ian, welcome to ECN!.
Did you guys know, that those little fences that they put aroud poles are not to prevent animals climbing the poles.
It's people they try and keep out, as well.
Over here, we use a single band of 500mm Stainless sheet around the poles to stop the possums and other wildlife climbing our poles.
The band is mounted at 3 metres from the ground.

Known affectionately as ARSS 's!! Auto reclosure section shunts.

They are the replacement of automatic break-makes found all over the OH system in remote areas which would reset themselves a preset number of times (usually 3) under fault conditions before locking out until manually reset. Usual cause was trees/conductor clash, so if the fault was clear ( ie the branch fell to the ground ) the shunt stayed in and everyone was happy!

Ours, in the Lakes, can be remotely switched from Manchester Control ( used to be Carlisle ) and are used to divert/isolate for linework, but they still drop out in fault conditions with the autoreset function.

Typical of this country though; if a crew requests a dead line, Manchester switches it, but a man still has to go and visual the unit to check it's open!! :roll eyes Same applies at 3.00am in fault condition - the lights might be out and the signal red in Manchester, but someone still has to check even if the ARSS is 10 miles from the tree branch hanging in the lines...

Oh well...better safe than fricaseed. Hope that helps a little

[This message has been edited by uksparky (edited 07-07-2004).]

Interesting. I knew that we'd had the auto-reclosers for a long time, and they seemed to be especially useful when I lived in Cornwall in the 1980s as outages were quite frequent.

Having somebody go out to the unit to check that it's opened the line seems to defeat the whole point of having remote-control. As you say though, how typically British!

What would be wrong with the following? Crew requests dead line, control center sends command to open the remote switch, crew at work point tests line to check it's now dead. Too simple?

By the way, is this still 11kV circuits you're referring to which are controlled from Manchester? Higher voltage transmission lines I could understand, but it seems rather a long way away for the control of local distribution circuits.


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 07-08-2004).]

Like Ian mentioned, you can add sectionalisers downstreams the reclosers. It senses overcurrents but doesn't do anything about it until the recloser opens. When the power is off, it opens. When the recloser closes, the rest of the line gets the power back but the section downstreams the sectionaliser stays off. The idea is that these things are simpler and cheaper than the ARSS's/reclosers.

I'm sure Ian can tell us more

The recloser in these pictures is a Whipp & Bourne GVR (made in UK by FKI) with a Panacea control (made in USA by SEL).

The GVR uses vacuum bottles insulated in an SF6 tank as someone mentioned in their post. Very nice device, but very unique in its apearence.

I think in one of the pictures you can see an antenna, so they must have this one fitted with a radio for SCADA comms.

These controls store all of the same data whether they have radios or not, but the radio allows remote retrieval of the data, polus remote metering and control.

Very useful devices, they can give you a very accurate distance to the fault that helps a lot in systems without a lot of lateral. On transmission (high voltage) systems, these types of devices can locate the fault within a line span or less. Lots better than driving the whole line to look for a problem.

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Lots better than driving the whole line to look for a problem.

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Not on double time it isn't.

Ian

The rural networks in the Republic of Ireland are currently undergoing a pretty massive upgrade project. Infact, the single biggest electrical project since rural electrification took place originally!

I'm not 100% sure what kind of sectionalising arrangements are being put into the newly upgraded parts of the network.

The ability to automatically reset after faults has been around for quite some time.

The massive network investment's being driven by huge growth in power consumption in Ireland over the past decade the economy's booming and the population's growing quite fast too. (more than doubled since 1988!)

E.g. there were 90,000 new customers connected to the network last year! (Ireland's total population's only 4 million. so that's a hell of a lot of extra connections in a year)

There has been very signifigant growth outside of the major urban areas, particularly as Dublin's commuter belt's expanded but a smaller towns have also seen their own organic growth. All of this is pushing the capacity of the existing infrastructure to its limits.

They've also replaced over 65,000km of the MV network in the space of 5 years.. so quite a busy time if you're a linesman over here

I'll try and find out what kind of stuff they're using in terms of automation in remote areas and post when I do