February 7, 2019
GEORGIA’S ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE ON OUR MIND
When properly maintained, electrical transformers — those sturdy gray boxes that translate high-voltage current into the everyday electricity that flows from wall sockets — can last for decades. But they can also fail suddenly and catastrophically — one such event recently turned the sky over New York City electric blue. Technicians try to stay on top of maintenance by making regular health checks at transformers, but with so many devices in service, it can be hard to keep up. Now the century-old utility Georgia Power, in league with GE, is going at the problem from the other direction: What if, instead of sending technicians out to collect data, they could just have the data come to them?
Smart power: In 2015 Georgia Power, which is owned by Southern Company, signed an agreement to install GE sensors on 1,000 of its transformers. They automatically monitor dissolved gas levels in the transformers’ oils, a crucial measure of health. If something seems awry, the system alerts engineers to investigate further. Georgia Power estimates that the monitoring system has already resulted in four big saves, including one in 2016, when sensors helped technicians identify a transformer that was on the verge of failure. The device was taken out of service and replaced within a week — without any disruption. High-tech monitoring, says Southern Company principal engineer Elizabeth Bray, is “helping us to become a utility of the future.”
GE and Georgia Power are a peach of a pair, no? Find out more about their partnership here.
THE GRID’S UNSUNG HEROES
Your neighborhood electrical substation probably isn’t much to look at, but what such a structure lacks in glamour it more than makes up for in utility. Substations are the grid’s unsung middlemen, converting the high-voltage power that travels from generating plants near and far to the kind of electricity you can depend on from the socket. For the people tasked with keeping them humming, substations can be a piece of wildly complicated infrastructure. But GE Grid Solutions is working to simplify that: Just like record players gave way to MP3s, the grid is going digital.
Digital killed the analog star: The Australian city of Avon recently installed the world’s first digitized substation built by GE. Now grid operators, taking advantage of thin fiber-optic cable, can get data galore about every aspect of their technology. “You just can’t get that kind of data in a copper-based, analog world, because it would be wildly expensive to install sensors on individual wires and cables,” said Ashvin Bapat, a product marketing director at GE Grid Solutions. In addition to shrinking the physical footprint while adding digital eyes to every corner of the substation, the fiber-optic cables don’t themselves conduct electricity, leading to a safer workplace for technicians. They also cost less than copper wiring.
Like an iceberg, there’s much more to an electric substation than you can see aboveground. Click here to learn what happens beneath the surface.
BRIGHT LIGHTS, SMART CITY
Since early 2018 San Diego has been installing new streetlights that use built-in sensors to help the city function better. Those sensors track cars and pedestrians to help planners decide how to place stop signs, time traffic signals and optimize parking. Built by Current by GE, the sensors are connected to Predix, GE’s software platform for the Industrial Internet, which allows engineers to collect information and harness it with bespoke apps. So far San Diego has installed about 2,000 from an initial order of 3,200 smart streetlights — but the results to date have been sufficiently impressive that the city’s gone ahead and asked for 1,000 more.
Sensor-y overload? No such thing. While San Diego is currently using the streetlights to manage traffic, future applications are wide-ranging: The sensors could collect intel on everything from the sound of gunshot to air quality. Erik Caldwell, the city’s interim deputy chief operating officer for smart and sustainable communities, told IEEE Spectrum that the near real-time information provided by the streetlights has opened up a whole new world of urban planning, even if most of it has yet to come to fruition: “It’s not super-exciting yet in terms of applications from the outside looking in. But it’s like we asked for a cold drink of water and got shot in the face with a firehose.”
Speaking of which, San Diego is also investigating how to use streetlight data to help its fire department get to emergencies more quickly. Learn more from IEEE Spectrum here.
— VIDEO OF THE WEEK —
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“Every utility has had a transformer fire, where several million dollars’ worth of an asset is gone in the blink of an eye.”
— Elizabeth Bray, principal engineer at Southern Company
Quote: GE Reports. Image: Chris New for GE reports.
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