A smart grid needs smart monitoring

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the electricity consumption has experienced phenomenal growth across the world. This may impose heavy load on power plants such as cables, as many of them are approaching the designed life consequently resulting in the reduction of reliability of power networks. The constraint imposed by aged power cables on increased customer demand on supply reliability has become a bottleneck in the operation of electricity networks. Therefore, smart monitoring plays a crucial role in improving the reliability of power network. This paper aims to discuss the importance of smart condition monitoring, taking power cable as an example, in smart grid. The paper introduces smart monitoring and asset management in smart grid in details and presents a physical configuration of on-line cable condition monitoring system. Partial discharge diagnosis is selected as an example in the paper to explain the benefits when smart monitoring is applied.