UKERC Energy Data Centre: Projects

Projects: Projects for Investigator

The project objectives are below:

• To investigate the effects of voltage change on the substation equipment
• To investigate how a voltage decrease can impact on energy bills
• To investigate the two different arrangements of the EMS Powerstar hardware

This project will be successful if we trial the voltage optimiser equipment, and either understand why it is not suitable for installation, or decrease the energy bills for the substation and ensure the hardware is reliable in a high voltage environment.

National Grid have large substation sites that are often heavy consumers of electricity. Introducing a voltage reduction system into incoming supplies is common practice for office and industrial installations and large savings in energy consumption are claimed. If we can reduce the amount of energy consumed per substation, we can reduce the overall impact of our assets. The issue with the standard technology is that we do not know how this will interact with existing systems that are designed to interact with High Voltage equipment. Demonstration This pilot is to install an EMS Powerstar Voltage Optimiser on one of the incoming LVAC supplies at Rayleigh substation and to carry out an evaluation of the benefits and any deployment issues over a period of 1 year.

There are 2 proposed options with different potential benefits:

1 x 500kVA unit on one transformer
2 x 500kVA units, 1 on each transformer

Note : Project Documents may be available via the ENA Smarter Networks Portal using the Website link above