ElectraNet is a private electricity transmission company tasked with operating high voltage connections between energy generators and large consumers (including the residential grid) in South Australia. With a transmission system spanning over 5,600km of network connectivity, ElectraNet plays a vital role in SA’s electricity supply chain. As renewable energy generation continues to grow in the energy production space, ElectraNet prepare to take on the challenges of a multi-source power grid.

Technical Situation

Large customers’ connections are often made with an agreed maximum demand, allowing ElectraNet to provide and maintain sufficient infrastructure. Monitoring adherence to these agreements is crucial to maintaining a stable grid and guide future system planning.

ElectraNet previously used spreadsheets to view historical trends but were not able to easily view real-time performance or be alerted if demand at a connection point temporarily exceeded the set agreement.

Requirements

• ElectraNet required an automated email notification sent when a connection maximum demand had been exceeded.
• ‘Short-term spike’ values (e.g. a large machine starting) needed to be excluded. However, if persistent exceedance occurs, ElectraNet needed to be informed.
• A specific requirement was that only one email be sent per connection point, per day, to prevent excessive emails from sites exhibiting repeated issues.

Design

Utilising ElectraNet’s existing AVEVA PI System – including PI Asset Framework, Analytics and notifications – GTS developed a solution which made use of the template features including SCADA tag naming and connection. With this approach, ElectraNet could add new customers or connection points simply in the future.

Set points were fetched and maintained within SQL, requiring minimal configuration when a new customer in brought in. PI AF Analytics was used to set a delayed trigger and delayed reset conditions.

Image: Max Demand Exceeded analysis breakdown.

GTS also provided SQL queries for ElectraNet to implement in their own reporting package.

Image: SQL queries

Value Add

During the project it was identified that ElectraNet would benefit from live dashboards providing an immediate overview of the history and current status of connection points.

GTS and ElectraNet agreed to add this requirement to the existing scope of work, constructing a series of element-relative displays making use of PI Vision collections.

The resulting dashboards provided a high-level customer summary, broken down into individual connection points. The use of PI Vision Collections, make it easy to add new customers and connection points without any alterations to the screens.

Image: Test dashboard screen

Project Outcome and Benefits

GTS successfully implemented 4 max-demand analyses, 2 element templates, and 2 event-frame templates in ElectraNet’s PI System. ElectraNet now receives 1 automated alert per day, per customer for all persistent Max Demand exceedances.

The addition of PI Vision dashboards to the scope was done so without hinderance to the original project budget or timeline. GTS provided a series of dashboards consistent with ElectraNet’s existing assets and in line with the new maximum demand database templates and connection hierarchy developed by GTS.

Business benefits include:

• Immediate alerts let ElectraNet take immediate action.
• Customer performance data is made more accessible through dashboards; minimising the need to delve through spreadsheets to find information.
• Clear view of exceedances; no need to retrospectively look through spreadsheets for something that might have happened.