Latest Thinking

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  Engineering Automation Drives Decision Making

  The information age has had a transformative effect on business and society, and the electric utility industry is no exception. New technologies in databases, monitoring hardware and control systems have put an unprecendented amount of data at the fingertips of utility engineers, planners and operators. The tools and processes to effectively manage and use this data historically have been underdeveloped, resulting in data sets being limited to single applications rather than leveraged across an organization. These data silos and incompatabilities between applications exemplify the modern adage of data rich and information poor (DRIP).

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• Comparison of Risk Assessment Approaches in Wide Area Protection Coordination

  The growing complexity of modern protection and control systems poses a great challenge to power transmission utilities in terms of maintaining and upgrading their network. Automated wide area protection coordination (WAPC) study is a tool that allows utilities to analyze protection coordination of all adjacent protection systems in detail and in a relatively short period of time compared to traditional methods of coordination analysis. Given the large scope of such studies, the results obtained can be overwhelming for a utility to analyze and/or to implement the recommendations in a reasonable period of time. Hence, utilities have to assess the risks associated with issues reported in the study and prioritize them to meet their specific requirements. This paper presents two different approaches adopted by two utilities from North America, namely Xcel Energy and AltaLink.

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