Wireless Sensors To Monitor Power Grids

Roland Piquepaille writes "Major power outages like the ones which affected the New York state last month or Western Europe ten days ago are becoming more frequent — even if their causes were different. In some cases, the utility companies have to dispatch electricians all over the place to discover the cause of the power failure or simply to restore power. Engineers at the University of Buffalo think they have a better solution: deploy wireless 'nanotech' sensors to monitor the networks and to find the exact location of a failure. They also say that even if the technology is almost available, several years of research are necessary before such a solution can be used by electrical companies. Read more for additional details about this attractive solution."

Tag this as blogspam

[Anonymous Coward]

and call its by its name

Read more for additional details [google.com]

or perhaps Roland is a script ? from the google search results it seems it just copies large chunks of other peoples articles and presents them on an advertising laden website and intersperses them with 20 word linking statements

should take about 5min for a perl programmer to replicate this Roland script

This is new?

[Mousit]

As someone who works in the electrical power industry I can say, yeah, we have wireless sensors already. Hell, we have wired sensors too, because there's all these big frickin' wires already running all over the place anyway, don'tcha know!


> ...One of the many implications for the developing nanotech sensors is their ability to pinpoint the exact location of a power outage...

Uh.. we also have such technology already, and in fact it's quite old. The same signal reflectors that are in a LAN cable tester and tell you the length of a cable, are used on an industrial scale to tell you where the end of a power line is. Program the monitor with "this line is 9,374 feet long" and it sees "8,124 feet long" then it can, in fact, tell you exactly where the break is, right down to the foot! Now, these industrial grade units are highly expensive (partly by their shear power and range, because I'm grossly underestimating; line lengths can reach over 20 continuous miles), so it MIGHT be news if these little "nano" buggers are cheap and plentiful but can still do the job.

Virtually every piece of equipment we have on the line has remote monitoring capability. Now, whether the power companies are USING it is another matter, because of cost and infrastructure and such. My own company has substations we have no remote monitoring on, just because they were deemed low priority enough to not spend money on enabling it. So needing to send crew door-to-door to find a downed line or a damaged power box is just not necessary (though barring major disasters, it can be cheaper than installing all that remote monitoring equipment).


The one thing I do see in the "additional details" article is the idea of using these things, because they're so small, to monitor every single home and business on the grid. That's something we don't currently do, mostly for cost reasons. We can see a neighborhood is down, but not a house. THAT would be news worthy I suppose. Otherwise, I see nothing in this article that is new, just "we've made it smaller!" and they therefore tacked the "nano" buzzword onto it and acted like it was the first time anyone ever created such a device.

we have monitors in California.

[OrangeTide]

Many areas of California have sensors deployed that run their health status over the powerlines themselves. making them "wirefree" (although not wireless as in radio). But these are not "nano", nor are they used to detect dangerous storms. They just sit on the pole and tell the power company if they need to send someone out to repair an issue. they do detect more than just power outage problems, enabling the power company to keep a high quality of service in remote regions. surprisingly this was done as a cost cutting measure, and has been successful. I wonder if a hall effect transistor or something on each "node" would let it detect storms without having to use some cutting edge technology as proposed in the article.

Not In Europe

[andersh]

The European power outage has nothing to do with this article since the "network became overloaded possibly because it shut down the transmission line over the river".

Link [chicagotribune.com]

I interned for a power company this summmer...

[Mutiny32]

And they already do this via microwave and radio. More specifically, they monitor a lot of their substations and large important objects via a telecom link and have RF or microwave transmitters as a backup. I worked for the department that monitored the transmission and distribution of power and I got to see exactly how their entire monitoring system for their entire grid works. Every point in their grid that can cause havoc is monitored in real-time (4 second interval). I don't exactly see what this article is getting at. In fact, this kind of monitoring is a FERC requirement. While not on a scale of what this article is saying, they can already pinpoint outages to the closest substation or transformer.

They already do this...

[maxconfus]

...but not using nanotech. Instead organizations who buy and sell electrical power pay people, like farmers, who have power lines running through their land to locate a sensor near the line to detect whether power is running or not. The obvious advantage to this is that if a known line that is connected to a known power generator is not running then they can bid up prices at another power generator.