An overview of Distribution Automation in TATA Power DDL and it's effective contribution for power sector reform in North and North West Delhi

Electricity is an essential enabler for sustainable growth of any county. In-spite of higher electricity demand, most of the distribution companies in India suffer from high AT&C loss and non-availability of technology. However, Government of India has taken important policy decisions for power sector reform and restructuring which effectively reduce the higher aggregated technical and commercial loss (AT&C) loss and ensure uninterruptable power for millions of consumers. Tata Power Delhi Distribution Limited (Tata Power DDL) is an example for power sector reform in Delhi through public private partnership. Re-engineering of business processes, enterprise resource planning, adoption of latest state of the art technologies, change management etc. help the utility to reduce overall AT&C loss from 53% to 8.54% over last 16 years of operation. Implementation of Distribution Automation is a major breakthrough for the utility in reducing system average interruption duration index (SAIDI) by faster identification of fault and restoration of supply, minimizing technical losses by Volt-Var control and dynamic shifting normal open point (NOP) which ultimately enhance consumer satisfaction level. Implementation of advance distribution management system (ADMS) with single user interface for SCADA, energy management system (EMS), distribution management system (DMS) and outage management system (OMS) ensures more network safety for remote operations as well as better consumer indexing. As distribution substations are scattered over large geographical areas, so cloud based communication is the most preferred and cost reflective solution in respect of present Indian scenario. However, use of public cloud for data transmission of automation devices requires cautious approach to implement a strong cyber security policy and to ensure periodic compliance of the same. This paper represents a holistic overview of distribution automation solution implementation in TATA Power DDL and its effective contribution for power sector reform in North and North West Delhi.