PROTECTION AND AUTOMATION STRATEGY AND PLANNING – Develop strategies for protective relaying and control integration and upgrades. Assess your protective relaying conditions and O&M practices. Analyze cost-benefits. Improve IED data management process. Study the protective relaying and automation impact on your power grid reliability. This can be part of an overall Visioning, Strategic Planning and Capital Budgeting effort.

NEEDS ANALYSIS AND IMPLEMENTATION PLANNING – Develop a coordinated, cost-justified and defensible plan for transmission and distribution system automation and protection improvements.

A typical engagement includes:

• Identify current and anticipated business issues
• Select prospective T&D automation and protection functions to address system issues
• Identify near and long-term improvement opportunities
• Assess existing facilities, infrastructures and operating practices
• Develop a conceptual architecture
• Do cost/benefit analysis
• Develop implementation strategy

This can be part of the overall Enterprise Process and Technology Integration effort.

PLANNING FOR EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES – Identify and plan for short-term and long-term infrastructure improvements needed to support emerging technologies such as smart grid (e.g. advanced automated sectionalizing and restoration devices, adaptive controls), distributed resources and advanced storage devices, Plug-in Electric Vehicles, Wide-area Monitoring and Control (WAMPAC), etc.

SYSTEM OPERATION AND DESIGN

PROTECTION COORDINATION – Establish relay setting procedures. Support you in the implementation and coordination of generation, bus bar, transformer, transmission, and distribution protective relay.

REAL-TIME WORK CONDITION ANALYSIS – Perform power system studies and fault analysis to determine various normal and abnormal real-time work conditions impacting reliability, selectivity and sensitivity of protective relaying solutions.

BEST PRACTICES AND STANDARDS – Benchmark your protective relaying, automation and control equipment, standards, and operation and maintenance procedures against industry best practices. Assess compliance to NERC requirements. Recommend strategic and tactical improvements.

IMPLEMENTATION

PROCUREMENT, IMPLEMENTATION AND INSTALLATION ASSISTANCE – Support acquisition of products and services for implementing the approved strategy. Provide project management, design review, testing, and commissioning of the selected products. See Implementation Support in Enterprise Process and Technology Integration.

POST IMPLEMENTATION ASSESSMENT – Evaluate observable benefits achieved through actual system operation against the predicted benefits, and recommend improvements.