Reliability & Resiliency
Tie Controller
Reliability and resiliency are of the utmost importance to distribution system operators and their customers. Utility technology and operations have developed to enable reconfiguration of the grid through FLISR1 and planned switching schemes. These schemes can quickly become complex, adding costly time to plan and execute, especially when there are contingency-related capacity constraints. The Tie Controller can be used to help rebalance circuits in a contingency configuration to enable faster FLISR with less concern of overloading equipment and distribution lines.
1 FLISR: Fault Location, Isolation, and Service Restoration
Phase-EQ
Application #1: The loss of a single-phase lateral can throw voltage out of balance along an entire feeder. The only way to correct this without restoring the faulted lateral, would be to re-tap another lateral, causing an outage for an even greater number of customers. The Phase-EQ can dynamically correct phase imbalance, eliminating imbalance resulting from a lateral fault, and making the system more resilient to lateral faults in general.
Application #2: As three-phase sections are reconfigured, there is uncertainty around how phase imbalance will aggregate in the new system configuration. The Phase-EQ can dynamically balance out the phases, ensuring that both voltage and load imbalance can’t damage equipment or cause nuisance trips as the grid is reconfigured to restore service.
Electric Vehicle Integration
Tie Controller
Electric Vehicles are poised to cause a sudden spike in load growth, at a rate that has not been seen for decades on the utility grid. This load growth has the potential to dynamically change the demand of the distribution system, which will likely be in flux for many years before EV adoption stabilizes. The Tie Controller can be used as a “solid-state” tool to dynamically balance new EV load from distribution circuit to distribution circuit, alleviating feeder level congestion, as well as substation level capacity constraints.
Phase-EQ
Electric Vehicles have the potential to create very sudden single-phase load growth. This loading could be more volatile than from any technology introduced to the distribution system since the adoption of electric air conditioners. The Phase-EQ has the ability to dynamically rebalance phase-to-phase loading on a second-by-second basis. The Phase-EQ can better serve increasing single-phase loads like electric vehicles, without potential power quality degradation, nuisance tripping, or attempting to band-aid the system with time consuming lateral re-tapping or three-phase line extensions.
Capital Efficiency
Tie Controller
The distribution grid is one of the most complex, reliable machines of the last 100 years, but even with reclosers and automated switches, the system is “brittle”. With uncertainty around electric vehicles, distributed generation, and reliability, it is important to look beyond replacing the same infrastructure with newer or larger power lines and substations. Throwing more wires at these problems can only get you so far.
The Tie Controller is one of the most capital-efficient methods to bring the electrical grid into the next century. The Tie Controller dynamically rebalances the grid in real-time, making operations more automated, flexible, and resilient. This solution requires limited engineering, planning, and permitting. Imagine increasing the reliability of ten circuits in the time it takes to plan and re-build one circuit! The Tie Controller is a bolt-on solution that allows utilities to make the most of the wires infrastructure that currently exists.
Phase-EQ
The Phase-EQ is a rapidly deployable solution for immediately increasing the load-serving capability of the grid without the need for building new wires. Legacy infrastructure upgrades can seem appealing, but these are “locked in” solutions that can not be easily moved or redeployed. These “wires” upgrades require intense planning, engineering, permitting, and construction. The Phase-EQ can have a similar impact across an entire distribution circuit, all packaged up in a single pad mounted device. The Phase-EQ is a capital-efficient investment that gets the most out of your existing wires infrastructure.
DER Connectivity
Tie Controller
With the adoption of distributed energy resources, currently led by (PV) solar, distribution utilities face imminent challenges in maintaining balance and reliability on the grid. Hosting capacities of traditional distribution networks are limited by various physical and regulatory constraints such as feeder capacity and voltage regulations, where intermittent injections of varying power at the grid-edge can interfere with their active system management and protection schemes. Moreover, they lack the ability to route excess generation from an injection point on one circuit to load pockets on another circuit.
With deployment of the TIE CONTROLLER, excess power generation can be routed in specified amounts to adjacent feeders with greater load, mitigating these hard-to-manage secondary effects. Studies performed by third parties have shown that up to 3 times as much solar hosting capacity is possible with the use of power electronics at normally-open tie point locations.
Phase-EQ
Single-phase generators can wreak havoc on a distribution circuit’s load and voltage balance. These imbalances can change as fast as the generation changes, that is to say, as fast as a cloud can cover a neighborhood of PV-lined roofs. The Phase-EQ is the right tool for dynamically balancing out single-phase generators at the grid edge. This tool can redistribute both real and reactive power on a sub-second basis, to ensure three-phase voltage and power balance across the circuit.
Upgrade Deferrals
Tie Controller
The Tie Controller offers a paradigm-changing approach to grid operation that can increase customer demand allowance through the intelligent routing of electric power and Volt-VAr Optimization (VVO) functions. The Tie Controller’s ability to effectively balance loads between neighboring circuits or substations can eliminate undue stress or inefficiency caused by overloading and congestion within distribution systems.
The Tie Controller provides a compelling non-wires alternative to modernize and fortify the distribution system, while deferring or even eliminating the need for multi-million-dollar line and transformer upgrades.
Phase-EQ
As load grows across the distribution grid, many utility planners find the need to extend three-phase service along single-phase laterals in a “line extension” to eliminate load and voltage imbalance effects created on the rest of the circuit. This is a permanent solution to a potentially temporary or still-developing problem. The Phase-EQ can be used as a dynamic tool to rebalance three-phase loading to solve immediate problems caused by long or heavily loaded single-phase laterals, as well as future imbalance that may still be in its infancy on a circuit. This is a more flexible, adaptive tool, than a three- phase buildout, and it can save real engineering, materials, and installation costs, both now and on an ongoing basis.
The best way to understand the impacts our devices can have on your system is to model them in your own distribution system planning tools.
