Integrated Smart Grid improves Nova Scotia Power's efficiency

Nova Scotia Power has implemented a new system from Schneider Electric to provide more sustainable and reliable energy by accurately locating faults and managing power outage incidents faster than ever in its electric distribution network.

The utility’s Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS)-based Outage Management System (OMS) will allow the company to better react to outages, as well as gain useful information for grid observation and outage predictions.

“Our employees now have real-time information at their fingertips where available, allowing them to quickly react to and repair any faults in the network,” said Paul Casey, senior director of transmission and distribution at Nova Scotia Power.

“Our goal is to offer our 500,000 customers the best service possible and our integrated ADMS helps us achieve that.”

A main advantage of an OMS capable of distribution management system (DMS) analysis is its ability to assist with fault locations and isolations. With a traditional OMS, when a fault in the network occurs, a utility needs to manually create a plan to isolate the problem before implementing safe and electrically sound restoration plans based on the current state of the electric grid.

The Schneider Electric OMS is designed to model current network loads in real time and look ahead at forecasted network loading.

The OMS can automatically create switch orders and integrate with its current standard protection requirements, reducing a significant amount of outage time and improving estimated time to restore (ETR) information for utility customers.

With the ADMS web-based crew management and outage reporting application, and an ADMS mobile field client, Nova Scotia Power can dispatch crews to the fault location, giving them more timely information on current network conditions.

“Schneider Electric OMS technology integrates with other enterprise utility systems to give utilities a true smart grid solution,” said Dragan Popovic, executive vice president, Smart Grid IT at Schneider Electric.

“We’re pleased Nova Scotia Power chose our OMS to help operate a more reliable network for their residential, commercial and industrial customers.”

The Schneider Electric ADMS solution suite includes OMS, DMS and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) tightly integrated with the Schneider Electric Geographic Information System (GIS).

Nova Scotia Power’s new ADMS solution is implemented as a complete information technology/operations technology convergence solution allowing the utility to provide more employees with access to real-time information.

Schneider Electric ADMS is currently deployed in over 26 countries serving more than 88 million utility customers.

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