The objective of the small-scale project was to gain knowledge, gather a consortium, and formulate a following full scale project, wherein implementation as well as development and research on technologies for power line monitoring will be performed. The expectation was that such full scale project will contribute stable power transfer capacity for rural municipalities, and thus increased resilience and possibility for these to participate in the ongoing green transition.
Important questions to answer in the pre-study were:
● What is the current need for increased regional power network capacity?
● What solutions for monitoring exist today that would be possible to implement in a
measurement scenario?
● What open technical and system level research and development questions can be
identified in relation to the needs and technologies identified above?
● Who are potential partners in a full-scale project, and what would their contributions be?
These learnings were intended to be a foundation in the formulation of a full-scale project.
To reach these goals, the project has worked in the context of three work packages; User perspective, Technology investigation and Distributor perspective. The project has herein gathered knowledge and spread information via numerous meetings and participation in arrangements with national and regional authorities, SMEs, as well as power network operators ranging from small scale local actors to national providers. The work has placed the question of line monitoring and supervision in a national context, with Fingrid, SvK and other operators as main national actors. Dialogues with Distribution System Operators and other regional actors have highlighted the specific needs and possibilities in the sparsely populated IA areas. Specifically, the findings show that the need for increased power network capacity is highly relevant for regions as well as national networks. The increase in distributed alternative energy production sources as well as the growth of electrically powered large industries both contribute to this development. A number of solutions for network monitoring exist and are available on the market. Many technical concepts are well developed. However, one area of possible further research is the means of power supply for an autonomous system, where power supply via capacitive coupling of the electric field would be one way to have a power supply that is independent of the current in the line. One challenge lies in the system level usage questions, where monitoring needs to be seamlessly integrated into the control systems.
The cross-border collaboration in the small-scale project has shown that the countries have similar systems with similar issues, but that sometimes different solutions are implemented.
Power line monitoring had the expressed goal to gain knowledge, gather a consortium, and formulate a following full scale project. The small-scale project has created the necessary network of connections to summon these participants, either as project partners or as supporting entities. In Call 7, Interreg Aurora granted funding to a regular project, REDEP – Resilient Dynamic Energy Production, building on the earlier small-scale project. The project’s lead partner is Luleå University of Technology, and the project partner is Lapland University of Applied Sciences.
Power line monitoring, A literature study performed within the project “Power line monitoring for increased resilience”, you can find it here.
Read more about the small-scale project Power line monitoring for increased resilience.
