How TECO Used Advanced Technology to Improve Grid Reliability
Image courtesy of Radek Kucharski under Attribution 2.0 Generic License, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.
Tampa Electric Company (TECO), a subsidiary of Emera Inc. which has been in operation for nearly 125 years, has expanded its use of various advanced technologies to boost the reliability of its grid. I’m sure this makes the company’s 800,000 customers very happy! Let’s take a deeper dive into some of the methods TECO has deployed in recent years to improve performance.
Examples of the Reliability-Boosting Technologies that TECO has Implemented
Much of the company’s current evolution was kickstarted in 2016 when it deployed a more advanced customer resource management (CRM) platform. While this deployment enhanced the company’s ability to automate and consolidate information, it was not the end-all-be-all. The next logical step was to leverage state-of-the-art technology at the meter level.
Thus, TECO decided to start replacing its aging automatic meter reading (AMR) meters with the increasingly functional advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). The advantages of AMI compared to AMR include the fact that AMI meters can automatically read and process meter data, can provide intelligence related to customer usage, and can automatically detect problems and generate alerts when something is amiss.
In conjunction with AMI, the utility also deployed an Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) to monitor and optimize the state of the distribution system, including the detection and communication of outage data. TECO also launched a few work management upgrades which improved the efficiency of crew dispatching and work order activities.
Additionally, the utility has been rolling out smart city IoT (internet of things) functionality which, among other things, can remotely control streetlights and provide outage alerts for customers. TECO has also recently deployed a volt/var optimization tool (controls the reactive power on the grid), and distributed intelligence (DI) applications (to provide advanced analytics at the meter level, currently encompassing 650k meters), for good measure.
Click on the link above to learn about the vendors TECO utilized to spearhead the implementations (Itron, CCI, IBM, Deloitte, UtiliAssist, etc.), the challenges the utility ran into, and the early financial results of these efforts.
In the final analysis, it looks to me like TECO is a progressive utility that has adapted nicely to the 21st century. Keep up the good work!
