Malung identifies incidents in their grid

It has been six months since Malungs Elnät added dInsight Analytic Platform from cleantech company Dlaboratory Sweden AB (publ) to increase the grid’s resilience. With the new data analytics tool installed in substation MA in Malung, Malungs Elnät is aiming to reduce incidents and outages. So, what have we learned?

The switchgear and the protection equipment in the substation where the system is installed is of higher age. The substation is feeding a grid consisting of both underground cables in the central parts of Malung and overhead lines in more rural areas. The cables were considered the most important parts of the grid to monitor, since they are old and oil-paper insulated.

Another reason is to be able to monitor the relay protection system to make sure it is working as desired.

dInsight Analytics Platform is based on unique patented algorithms, automatically analyzing deviations in primary substations. Harnessing this data, operations can make faster fault detection, and get early warnings for imminent faults. This enables not only efficient operations but allows also for proactive maintenance work.

Thanks to dInsight Analytic platform, Malung has already been able to identify some incidents in their system:

– Cable fault, dLabs solution could easily calculate approximately the location of the fault.

– Earth fault caused by a tree that had fallen over an overhead line.

Our primary ambition when installing the dLab solution was to supervise the cable grid feeding central parts of Malung, and with the system we have been able to detect and even approximately locate cable faults. Due to the benefits, we have seen, we have taken the first steps implementing the use of the analysis results in our organization. The staff that are on call duty receive messages from the system and we are currently training a wider part of the personnel in using the system, says Stefan Jansson, Operations and Grid manager at Malungs Elnät.