Powergrid Plans Eye In The Sky
Power Grid Corporation Ltd will use satellite technology to monitor power despatch quality and grid health. A special communications payload aboard Indias Insat satellites will connect to sensors at strategic locations along the grid path to beam back real-time information to ground control.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) is working out the technical details to hook up the various grids via satellite to provide rapid information about the location of faults and outages.
Isro sources said detailed plans were being prepared to identify and develop the hardware and software solutions needed for this new project.
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According to Isros in-house publication, Space India, the proposal envisions using satellites to interrogate sensors for autonomous maintenance checks to help avoid outages.
Under the envisaged system, powerful computers would draw information from the satellite and take split-second decisions on increasing or decreasing current flow.
The sources said the plan would need advanced computing solutions to make routine monitoring and maintenance checks fully or semi-automatic.
The help of a premier computers organisation like the Centre for Advanced Computing which is already doing some computing work for the Regional Load Despatch centres which operate the grids would probably be taken for this purpose, they added.
The satellite grid-connection plan is to be put in place within the next five years.
Accordingly, the new payload would be built into the Insat-2E or the next generation Insat-3 series planned for 2000 onwards.
PowerGrid Corporation has an ambitious plan of connecting all the eight grids into a national grid, vastly improving power availability to about 40,000 mw within the next 15 years.
Monitoring this massive infrastructure stretching across thousands of kilometres will be a highly complex task. Satellite-based information gathering could save both time and money and reduce reaction time, thus minimising outages.
Delay in fault location and repair is considered to be one of the main reasons for line failures.
With a satellite-based system in place, pin-pointing the location of faults will be extremely easy. Something this extensive can only be monitored from the sky, said the Isro source.