Siemens Energy, Inc. has been selected by KCP&L, Kansas City, Missouri, to provide a Smart Grid demonstration project showing how the latest technologies will enable the advanced utility of the future. Partial funding for the project is from the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act's Smart Grid Investment Grant Demonstration Project program. Siemens' scope of the project includes Siemens Spectrum Power distribution management system to coordinate the Midtown substation, Siemens Smart Substation Controller and control of all intelligent distribution field equipment.
KCP&L's Smart Grid demonstration project consists of four major components: distribution network automation, distribution network management, distributed energy resource and demand response management and advanced metering infrastructure and meter data management. The combination of functions will provide the basis with which to enable and manage the KCP&L Green Impact Zone in this project. The systems will be fully integrated with existing systems at KCP&L, functioning as an integral part of the KCP&L enterprise. As a whole, the program will verify a full range of standard modeling and information exchange protocols necessary to implement a functional, cost-effective and secure intelligent grid. The project will define, validate and verify the necessary parameters and potential solution adjustments for KCP&L to plan and implement a system-wide rollout of the successful technologies and processes.
"Siemens' technology will help KCP&L enhance service for the entire Kansas City Midtown area through improved reliability, reduced energy delivery costs, more efficient energy consumption, improved carbon footprint and enhanced information flow," said Ed Matthews, director, Smart Grid, KCP&L. "KCP&L believes this project will serve as a blueprint for future Smart Grid implementation and will accelerate a realization that the 'utility of the future' safely delivers reliable electricity with greater efficiency, reduced costs and improved environmental performance."
KCP&L will invest approximately $48.1 million and deliver meaningful benefits to the 14,000 customers in the Green Impact Zone area.
The Spectrum Power distribution management system (DMS) and Smart Substation Controllers provide the operational backbone of the system supporting significant levels of automation on the feeders, complex and automated feeder reconfiguration decisions and tightly integrated supervision with the control centers.
The DMS serves as the primary point of integration for the facilities, consumer, electrical system, load, distributed energy resource and real-time substation and feeder information. It includes outage management, distribution supervisory control and data acquisition, distribution network analysis and integration with KCP&L's existing mobile workforce management system, geographic information system and other supporting systems.
The Smart Substation controller establishes an intelligent substation information technology infrastructure with the ability to make feeder and substation reconfiguration decisions, control field equipment, verify operations, track local grid capacity and coordinate with the control center. This "proactive" management of the distribution grid is a necessary step in preparing for the integration of significant levels of renewable and variable energy resources, controllable demand and demand response. With the addition of distributed energy resources, the DMS and Smart Substation become essential to managing Volt/VAr conditions, adaptively modifying protection equipment settings and managing crew safety.
