The PPL Smart Grid project offers a better way to manage power distribution and will benefit customers not only in the project areas, but elsewhere across the company’s 29-county service territory.
In the pilot project areas, the upgrades will:
Strengthen reliability
- The new system will quickly detect and isolate problems that cause outages.
- It will automatically reroute power around the problem area, restoring power to most customers until repairs can be made. This quickly limits the number of people affected by a particular problem. Today, rerouting power often requires sending crews to switches in the field.
- We believe the new improvements will reduce the average time Harrisburg area customers are without power.
Save customers energy and money
- By improving operating efficiency, the smarter delivery system is expected to result in electricity savings for the affected Harrisburg area customers.
- Our upgrades will let us operate at slightly lower voltages, thereby reducing power consumption.
- Many customer appliances will use less electricity to perform the same jobs.
Help to reduce carbon dioxide emissions
- By saving energy, the smarter delivery system will help to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
- Provide a foundation for better integrating future wind and solar power
- The smart capabilities of the new delivery system will enable the company to better accommodate the intermittent output of wind power, solar power and other distributed generation sources as their popularity grows.
- It will enable us to balance supply and demand and keep the delivery system operating efficiently.
Improve situational awareness
- The data provided by the automated devices on the delivery system will give us a much better understanding of the system and the demands placed on it.
- This will help us better plan and prioritize future improvements to the system.
Across the system
- The new distribution management system will collect information from certain smart devices on other parts of the company’s 29-county delivery system beyond the Harrisburg region and make decisions to more effectively manage outages. This will help to speed power restoration across the entire delivery system.
- Also, while the new system won’t be able to manage the conventional switching devices beyond the 150-square mile project area, it will calculate the best switching steps for system operators to take, saving them valuable time in responding to customer outages.
- Our long-term objective is to add automated devices elsewhere and extend the capabilities of distribution automation to other areas of our delivery system within eastern and central Pennsylvania. A key piece of the smart grid, the distribution management system, will already be in place when we do.