Customer Services - Permanent Power Quality (PQ) Function

Contents

• Narrative
• Steps

Narrative

The purpose of the permanent power quality measurement enterprise activity is to provide long-term and continuous monitoring in order to provide reliability and benchmarking statistics.

Many customers which can include utilities and large consumers of electric power have a need for an installed permanent power quality measurement system.  Historically, power quality meters were portable and installed on a temporary basis in order to capture, diagnose, and solve a specific problem that might be occurring in the facility.  However, with increased demands for power quality and reliability benchmarking, power quality contracts, billing and energy use verification, predictive maintenance and others, the need and demand for permanent power quality monitoring has increased dramatically in recent years.

The following is a typical scenario.  An electric utility realizes the need for a permanently installed power quality measurement system.  The reason could be new standards from the state PUC or competitive threats or even just to keep existing customers happy.  In addition, the utility could be implementing power quality contracts and needs a mechanism to verify performance.  A utility will then generally procure and install monitors at various locations.  The locations could be statistically selected or just placed at key customer locations.  Once the instruments are installed, it will be necessary to establish communication from a central location to the instruments.  At the central server location, there will generally be two types of applications.  The first is the downloading application that uses the communication medium selected and is used to setup and download the data from the instruments in the field.  This requires communication from the central server location to the monitoring instrument either by telephone, Internet, satellite or other.  Typically this is done on a daily basis or after a significant event occurs.  The instrument captures and stores event data in standard or proprietary form inside instrument.  Optional gateway device downloads event data from instrument, converts it to a standardized format (IEEE 1159.3 PQDIF), and stores until downloaded by enterprise system.  Enterprise system downloads data from the instrument or gateway, converts to standard format if necessary, and puts in standardized file hierarchy (IEEE 1159.3 PQDIF Annex C) and/or a commercial power quality database (e.g. PQView). The second application resides on the central server and is usually a database application that is used to characterize, store and report results from the data collection.  The central server also typically acts as a web server and is used to supply data over corporate intranets or the internet itself.

 

 

Steps