System faults happen all the time and occur when equipment fails, trees fall on lines, or other events that causes unintended changes in electrical signals (voltages, currents, etc.) often resulting in power outages. Microprocessor based protection relays are specialized computers programmed to help protect electrical equipment from damaging currents and keep power flowing. Whenever a fault occurs it can be challenging to investigate what caused the fault and how to prevent it from happening again. It could be that the relay was not programmed properly and miss-operated. The time consuming process of investigating faults often involves driving or remoting into a substation or power plant, logging into the device, downloading the file, then traveling back to the office to investigate. VigilantGrid reduces all of this time by automatically (a) alerting when a fault condition has occurred, (b) logging what type of fault it was, (c) extracting the fault values (analogs and binaries), and (d) in near real-time makes available all information for an engineer to investigate.
Benefits include:
- Fast root cause analysis
- No truck rolls required traveling to the site saving, time, gas, and other vehicle operating expenses
- Extra cybersecurity as no need to remote in to protected assets to extract desired fault files
- Increased operational security (P&C definition of security) and reliability
- Provides a historical record of faults (location, relay, and cause)