Communication Architecture for Automatic Faults Detection and Clearance in Secondary Distribution Power Grid: The Case of TANESCO

A significant work has been done by electric power utility companies, in Tanzania and worldwide, to implement automated protection and control in their electric power grids. The automation is mainly implemented in generation, transmission and primary distribution parts of the grid, in order to guarantee quality of service to customers. However, for secondary distribution part of the grid in Tanzania, there is no much automation that has been put in place, as a result, defects and faults in the secondary distribution power grid are reported mainly by customers or through visual inspection (physical visits) by utility company personnel. This makes the entire process from faults occurrence, reporting and faults clearance be time consuming and costly. Automation in fault detection and clearance can be addressed by implementing a smart grid. The smart grid is facilitated by the presence of a well dimensioned communication architecture that can allow inputs from sensors to be conveyed to control elements in the control center, which will generate control messages for transmission to various points in the smart grid for appropriate actions. In the current setup, Tanzania's electric grid does not have a communication architecture to support two-way communication between secondary distribution network and control center for automation. In this paper, secondary distribution network architectures and communication technologies are surveyed. Thereafter, through Challenge Driven Education (CDE), a hybrid communication architecture with appropriate technologies convenient for Tanzania Electric Power Utility (TANESCO) to facilitate automatic faults detection and clearance is proposed. A prototype of the architecture was piloted and results obtained show that the communication architecture made up of distributed processing and hybrid communication technologies was capable to facilitate automatic faults detection and clearance in the scattered secondary distribution network.