Note: This article is about electricity network planning and design. Click here to read about fiber network planning and design.
Plan and design electricity network changes with the optimized technical solution and controlled financial investment.
Proper electricity network planning processes and calculations are essential for any electricity network expansion, modification, or modernization to guarantee a safe, uninterrupted energy supply during the changes. With the dpPower Electricity Network Planning, engineers and other utility experts engaged in planning get the tools they need to ensure an efficient design process – and optimum design outcome.
The workflow management system minimizes administrative effort and ensures adherence to process rules. The system supports all common electricity distribution network planning activities, including new design, replacement, relocation, and new customer connections. Internal workflow and approval processes are organized in projects and tasks shared between different stakeholders and departments. Templates exist for these processes, but you can customize the workflow to your organization’s structure and business processes, including configurable tools to manage internal approvals.
dpPower Electricity Network Planning allows electricity network planners to quickly and accurately perform an analysis on newly designed electricity networks of any voltage level – high, medium, or low.
Key features include:
- Balanced load flow with fault calculation: Features for balanced load-flow calculations with or without load calibration. Electricity network states evaluated include complex voltages, currents, flows of real and reactive power, voltage drops, losses, short currents, and others.
- Unbalanced load flow with fault calculation: The same features as above but used in unbalanced electricity networks with single-phase loads, SWER networks, or street-lighting networks. This type of calculation can also estimate the consequences of unbalanced loads in the electricity network.
- Fault calculation: For medium-voltage electricity network analysis, you can calculate three-phase short-circuit currents, two-phase short-circuit currents, single-phase fault currents and voltage settings of earthed equipment, and two-phase-to-earth short-circuit currents. For medium voltage networks, you can calculate three-phase short currents and phase-to-neutral-conductor short-circuit currents.
- Protection analysis: Short-circuit capacity, detection, and protection selectivity analysis performed with the fault calculation.
- Capacitor optimization: Calculates and presents optimal placement for capacitors, considering capacitor costs and losses.
- Load curve and load-profile generation: Supports generation of statistical load curves and/or profiles for each meter or group of meters. Load profiles can be generated based on meter measurements (readings) originating in the Meter Data Management (MDM) system. The resulting load curve will vary according to customer type (ISIC code), temperature set, holiday season, and day type.
- Predictive load flow: If you need to analyze load flow in varying system conditions, such as fluctuations in distributed energy participation or loads, you can extend the analysis over a longer time horizon. This provides a predictive estimation of grid state, including daily or weekly voltage, current, and power-flow profiles to support design decisions.
Additional features of dpPower include:
- Cost calculation and estimation
- BOM and purchase order preparation
- Approval process based on alternative design scenarios
- Project, work and resource management