Electric Utilities

Stedin – The NetherlandsUnderground Self-Healing Network

Rotterdam’s waterfront area is now protected by Stedin’s self-healing solution

The Customer Stedin is one of the Netherlands’ largest utilities, with over 2 million customers for electricity and more than 1.5 million for gas. The company is headquartered in Rotterdam and serves three of the Netherlands’ four biggest cities as well as critical infrastructure, government offices, major financial and industrial customers, and the Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port.

The Challenge To better serve its customers, Stedin wanted to upgrade its infrastructure and reduce the frequency and duration of potential power outages. So the challenge facing the utility was to come up with a cost-effective, automated solution to quickly re-energise its MV network in case of a fault, identifying the fault location and reconnecting the maximum number of consumers and businesses within 1 minute.

The Partnership Having considered its options, Stedin turned to Schneider Electric.

The reason? Firstly, the two companies already had a business relationship, having worked together in the past on several projects.

PROJECT AT A GLANCE Project TypeImplementation of Underground Self-Healing Network

CustomerStedin (electric and gas utility)

LocationRotterdam, The Netherlands

ApplicationsUnderground MV Network

Equipment InstalledPrimary: Easergy T200 Remote Terminal UnitSecondary: Motor drives for ring main units

CUSTOMER BENEFITS• ‘Self-healing’ solution enables fault isolation

and service restoration in under 30 seconds

• Decentralised offer provides flexibility and ease of configuration

• Cost-effective modernisation, using an off-the-shelf product

• Quick design and implementation of solution

• Easy to roll out, no DMS required

• Simple migration path from switch solution to self-healing solution

• Ease of scalability and replicability

• Peace of mind

Document Number 998-1167744_GMA-GB January 2013

© 2

013

Sch

neid

er E

lect

ric, A

ll rig

hts

rese

rved

. All

trad

emar

ks a

re o

wne

d b

y

Sch

neid

er E

lect

ric In

dus

trie

s S

AS

or i

ts a

ffilia

ted

com

pan

ies.

Schneider Electric

Head Office

35, rue Joseph Monier

92500 Rueil Malmaison Cedex France

Tel.: + 33 (0) 1 41 29 70 00

http://www.schneider-electric.com

“The relationship between Schneider Electric and Stedin is fantastic... But I prefer to look forward into the future, and especially our future, because more intelligence, more self-healing networks are needed.”Marko Kruithof, Grid Coordination Manager, Stedin

In this project, the Schneider Electric team was able to foresee, and thus avoid, a number of problems that might have affected the solution as it was originally conceived.

Another factor was the Easergy T200, an existing product that could be employed with only minor reconfiguration, significantly speeding up the project and the return on the investment.

The Solution The result of this partnership was an innovative underground self-healing network solution.

“The self healing solution allows Stedin to locate and insulate the MV fault as quickly as possible while disturbing the minimum of customers”, according to Lucas Pellegrin, Feeder Automation VP at Schneider Electric. “When as I say as quick or as fast as possible, it is less than 1 minute to reconfigure the global network”, he added.

The Easergy T200 is the basis of the solution and a total of 7 units were installed within a 33-substation loop located in downtown Rotterdam. Motor drives were also installed on selected ring main units to connect Easergy T200 units. The project took around a year to complete, from first concept to energisation.

In addition, thanks to the flexibility of the Easergy T200, the solution is easily scalable and replicable in other locations. It can also be fitted with sensors to gather data about faults and power flow.

The Bottom Line Stedin’s newly installed underground self-healing network was inaugurated in June 2012. For the Dutch utility, the system offers a number of benefits, including good publicity and valuable training for technical staff.

“I think in the near future we will have much more distributed automation in the distribution grid than we do have right now”, said Edward Coster, an expert in Stedin’s SM Management Department. “And to me the main benefit of having a self-healing grid automating the distribution feeders is getting this experience.”

Yet the biggest beneficiaries of the self-healing network are Stedin’s customers. In case of an outage that might otherwise last 2 hours, the system cuts the time to re-energise the unaffected parts of the grid to under 30 seconds. That means greater power availability for customers dependent on electricity.

The self-healing network isolates the faulted area, restoring power to unaffected customers in under 30 seconds. Here’s how it works:

According to Marko Kruithof, the technical teams quickly found they understood each other very well.

123

4

Fault occurs Isolate

Close open point

Isolate

Close

1

2

3

4