Smarter, greener substations

Utility Week speaks to Frederic Godemel, executive vice president for power systems at Schneider Electric, about their efforts to make switchgear both smarter and greener by integrating monitoring and communications technology and ending the use of SF6 as an insulator.

Fifteen years ago, says Godemel, “the only thing that was monitored was probably the high voltage network because that’s where the balance between demand and supply was made”.

He continues: “We know that with the new electric world, which is one of more renewables mostly injecting at medium voltage and more local consumption due to electric vehicles and storage, we will have to be able to exchange data at the medium voltage levels and probably in the future at the low voltage level. And we know that customers will need to be able to monitor at least and make use of data at those two levels.”

At the same time, companies like Schneider also have a more direct role to play in fighting climate change. Their own switchgear has until recently relied on the use of sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) – the most powerful greenhouse gas known to man – as an electrical insulator. Just one kilo has an equivalent effect on the climate as around 23 tonnes of carbon dioxide if it leaks into the atmosphere.

After starting the journey around a decade ago, Godemel says the firm has come to market with medium-voltage switchgear that uses just plain air and vacuums in place of SF6, whilst incorporating the monitoring and communications technology that networks will need to build and operate the smart grid of the future. It is now shifting its focus to low-voltage equipment, which he claims will be available as soon as utilities and regulators are ready.

Even if networks are unable to take full advantage of them straight away, Godemel says building smart capabilities into switchgear from the start will bring benefits down the line: “Instead of going one by one and instrumenting your install base, which is pretty slow, we have a now a full package of solutions in which the sensors are already in.”

“At the low voltage, there are a lot of sites and we want to be able to give to the user native connectivity capabilities so if they want in the future – they may not need it now – they want to monitor data points on their low voltage network, they will be able to do it.”

“The only additional thing they will need to do is connect the gateway,” he adds. “They will not have to open the tank which is, by the way, very difficult to do”.

Godemel says improved monitoring will have immediate benefits in terms of safety and reliability. If, for example, if a bus bar is overheating, “we can alert the user and prevent any network damage like an electricity fire”.

He says the new units it is developing will have the same footprint as their predecessors, meaning network can already start planning for replacement.

The main barrier to rolling out SF6-free switchgear, he argues, is no longer the technological but regulatory: “In many countries, and this is true in the UK, the qualification and regulation and approval of the new technology takes a bit of time.”

He adds: “Our solutions are advanced enough that we will be able to deploy those solutions at the speed of the openness of the market.”

Godemel says networks not only need permission to use the equipment but also incentives or requirements to do so.  Nevertheless, he believes they would mistaken to sit back and wait for things to happen: “If you don’t move quickly, then you may face a definitive ban on your network that will generate a huge amount of investment that you will not be able to do,” he explains.

“It’s better to anticipate.”