S&C Electric Company, an innovator of resilient grid technology, has signed a framework agreement with National Grid Electricity Distribution to improve the reliability and resilience of the UK’s electricity distribution network, serving nearly 8 million customers.
S&C will deliver its TripSaver II Cutout-Mounted Recloser to National Grid to improve power resilience, reliability, operational efficiency, and customer experience as part of the agreement.
The agreement followed after a TripSaver II recloser trial, which reduced power interruptions and the total time customers were without power. The reclosers also reduced the need to send out line crews for immediate troubleshooting to sites.
TripSaver II reclosers provide an advanced spur-protection strategy to manage temporary overhead line faults like tree contact, wildlife, and flying debris, equivalent to more than ninety percent of the faults in the trial. They not only combine the best aspects of fuse-saving and fuse-blowing strategies to improve system reliability but also prevent temporary faults from becoming sustained outages, avoiding short interruptions on feeders by only blinking the affected spurs.
The reclosers improve customer satisfaction scores, customer interruptions (CIs), and customer minutes lost (CMLs) by reducing a sizable number of sustained outages.
