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Psymetrix solution to billion dollar blackouts
Psymetrix has a unique technology solution which would have provided North American power companies with at least 4 hours warning that the power transmission system was vulnerable before the widespread power cuts last week. This advance warning, plus the ability to pinpoint the location of the problem and the necessary remedial action, would have meant that last week's wide scale blackouts and the massive consequential costs to the US and Canadian economies could have been avoided.
Industry advisers have suggested that billions of dollars need to be ploughed into the US power system to prevent future incidents, while experts warn that similar problems could strike the UK this winter following significant cuts in spare generation capacity and greater demands being placed on remaining plant.
However, the Psymetrix StormMinder Power Dynamics Management system could prevent these blackout situations without the need for such massive scale investment, says Jos Trehern, Chief Executive of Psymetrix.
"Up until now power companies have had to base their decisions on controlling power systems entirely on simulations," said Jos Trehern, explaining the problem. "Without any real-time dynamics information, power companies have to all intents and purposes been flying blind, while at the same time power systems are under greater pressure than ever. Often the problem isn't even that the systems are running at, or even near, maximum capacity. The problem can be uncertainty about system stability and the growth in generation sources, particularly from renewables, and interconnected networks are increasing the potential for instability. Once instability occurs on a network, operators need to have information about where the instability is coming from so that they can take corrective action without making the problem worse. Typically this will mean rescheduling generation. However operators need to choose generation that is not contributing to the instability. If they are unable to do this because of constraints on the choice of generation, they can choose to shed load rather than end up driving the system into greater instability and collapse."
Conventional thinking has assumed that the only solution to this problem is to invest billions of dollars in new transmission lines and equipment. However, Psymetrix's StormMinder PDM provides an alternative solution.
StormMinder PDM is the first technology solution to give power companies real-time decision-making capabilities related to dynamics, enabling them to simultaneously improve reliability and release locked-in transmission and generation capacity. By supplying real-time operational dynamics information, StormMinder PDM enables companies to work with limits based on direct performance measurements rather than theoretical simulations.
This gives power companies the capability of managing their power systems to minimize the risk of uncontrolled dynamic disturbances and to securely increase power transfer levels while avoiding disastrous system blackout situations.