Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. has selected Sensus, a Xylem brand, as its provider for grid monitoring technologies.
Sensus’ remote telemetry module (RTM II), a wireless communication processing tool, was initially deployed to monitor grid conditions and protect against outages. Central Hudson has expanded this solution to include capabilities for distribution automation (DA) to optimize assets across their evolving network.
As solar farms grew in their service area, Central Hudson recognized the potential for excessive grid backflow and overvoltage that could cause system damage. Wanting to protect their infrastructure and mitigate potential issues in a simple and cost-effective way, their engineering team came up with a design for a direct transfer trip (DTT) system that would merge communications from the interoperable RTM II with circuit breakers and reclosers.
The system automatically isolates a distributed energy resource (DER), or small-sized power generation unit, when a condition exists that can lead to excessive reverse power flow or overvoltage is detected and helps ensure grid stability.
“It’s a simple design that required little hardware or investment for set up,” says Ryan Yakush, an engineer at Central Hudson. “So we recognized the potential to launch the solution on a large scale.”
After successful testing, Central Hudson moved forward with a rollout of the DTT system in its northeast region. The solution has now been installed across five solar farms with sizes ranging from 2 to 5 MW. The team anticipates that the ease of configuring the system will make it easy to add more installations in the future.
