Power utility Florida Power & Light (FPL) is launching a smart grid data center. The center will provide FPL engineers with real-time diagnostics of the grid’s health.
In turn, the smarter grid will help improve service reliability and outage detection, besides creating more accurate time estimates for restoration of services.
According to a press statement, the Power Delivery Diagnostic Center is designed to “leverage advanced smart grid technology to better manage the electric system and deliver reliable service”.
FPL had started providing smart meters to users connected to their grid in 2010. US Department of Energy (DOE) had sanctioned partial funding of $200 million for the project.
FPL, too, invested $600 million in the project over five years.
Manny Miranda, vice president of power delivery for FPL, said: “Through innovative solutions such as this diagnostic center, we have greater awareness of the performance of FPL’s grid, enabling us to improve reliability for our customers.”
According to FPL, smart meters helped the company run its operations more efficiently saving itself more than $30 million in operations in 2014 alone. The company has stated that the savings came from 170,000 fewer field visits by its staff over the year.
Also in 2014, FPL installed 150,000 smart meters for commercial and industrial customers, besides 1,600 automated switches to the electric system.
The utility replaced 2,000 transformers, and addressed 10,000 issues before the customer reported an outage.
This year the company plans to deploy devices including 775 automated feeder switches, more than 20,000 automated lateral switches, distribution grid sensors and monitors, fault current indicators and vault transformer monitors as part of smart grid deployment to commercial and industrial customers.
Ajith Kumar S
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