A new player in the African energy market and a Platinum Partner of the upcoming Enlit Africa event, Gridspertise will showcase its solutions to accelerate transformation of the continent’s power distribution sector.
The company recognises that the challenge Africa faces in developing universal access to energy requires an integrated electrification strategy, scaling up investments not only to install new renewable energy capacity but also to strengthen and expand grid infrastructures.
African transmission and distribution networks require significant upgrades: they need to keep pace with forecast population growth and demand for electricity, and they need to guarantee a reliable service – improving on that which today is very unstable and carries high losses (up to 29%).
Additionally, low customer satisfaction, together with socioeconomic and governance factors, give rise to energy theft and credit risk, reducing revenues for utilities. All these factors indicate that investments in grid extensions and connections are difficult to sustain financially – which results in aging and inadequate infrastructure and an increasing need for repair and maintenance.
Gridspertise can support African utilities to transform their networks into sustainable and reliable smart grids. The new company, born out of Enel, the world’s largest privately owned operator of power distribution grids with more than 20 years of expertise in the field, offers cutting-edge flexible solutions to address some of the main challenges in Africa: revenue protection, power reliability improvement, maintenance efficiency and fast response and restoration.
Revenue Protection
Gridspertise’s ecosystem of smart meters, field devices, and HES and MDM systems, can support utilities in managing electricity demand more effectively and efficiently. Leveraging granular consumption data, these solutions increase grid reliability, allowing for real-time monitoring of electricity use, advanced management of the grid’s technical parameters and immediate detection of faults and outages. They also improve billing data collection efficiency and enable data-driven inspection through energy balance and big-data analytics, as well as providing advanced anti-tampering functionalities and evolved fraud detection. Furthermore, the solutions include tools to execute work orders remotely, increasing efficiency of field operations.
Power reliability improvement
The Grid Automation Management solution makes it possible to tackle power interruptions and outages effectively, enabling advanced fault location to identify power supply interruptions, and thus improving grid reliability.
Through integration with remotely controlled devices and protections in the field, the system also supports the remote optimised isolation of faults and execution of network reconfiguration and self-healing. This solution is retrofit compatible with legacy SCADA systems.
Maintenance efficiency
The early identification of vegetation and other elements that can interfere with distribution networks is a key aspect in ensuring reliable and continuous power and optimising maintenance costs. Gridspertise’s Network Digital Twin® suite creates a virtual replica of the electric grid and components by acquiring and processing datasets of lidar, images and sensors. With its 3D viewer and computer vision functions, it facilitates vegetation management and predictive maintenance. It enables utilities to prevent power outages and streamline maintenance activities through targeted interventions.
Fast response and restoration
Gridspertise also provides digital Enhanced Workforce applications which enable prompt and safe intervention if outages arise. The entire network cartography is available through a smartphone app, with augmented reality, and can be navigated offline in real time, from a national scale to a single-user view. This enables utilities to manage LV grid connections directly in the field, as well as providing for safe training of field workers and streamlining of field operations.
Gridspertise will take part for the first time at Enlit Africa 2022, 7 to 9 June at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.
For more information visit: www.gridspertise.com
