Utilities facing ageing, capacity-constrained grids have two bad choices with underground cables, according to Schneider Electric. They can wait for a fault to cause an outage, or take cables offline for testing and replace long sections, healthy ones included. The company says a new monitoring technology offers a third route.
The technology continuously measures partial discharge on energised cables, identifies its type, assesses the risk and locates it to about one metre across networks up to 2 km. It is designed to be deployed without intrusion on existing networks and is available now through Schneider's services teams in Europe, with global availability planned next. The company plans to build it natively into its medium-voltage switchgear range.
The firm will also preview the RM AirSeT 36 kV ring main unit, which pairs pure-air insulation with shunt vacuum interruption as an alternative to the greenhouse gas SF6 and extends its AirSeT technology beyond 24 kV. A second preview, RM AirSeT DC, is its first medium-voltage direct-current switchgear, aimed at hybrid AC/DC grids, and has already run in a pilot project.
For battery energy storage, Schneider is adding the EasyPact CVS DC breaker, EasyPact MVS DC switch-disconnector and EasyTeSys DC contactors. The CVS DC breaker offers 30 kA breaking capacity at 1,500 V DC, while the MVS DA1 handles short-circuit withstand of up to 250 kA with Schneider fuses.
On the software side the company will show its One Digital Grid Platform, ArcFM, EcoStruxure ADMS, DERMS and ETAP digital twins for grid planning, plus edge products such as EcoStruxure LV Grid Management and software-defined substations. It also highlighted collaborations with Kraken and AiDASH.
Laurent Bataille, executive vice president for Europe Operations, said the grid has to move from a largely reactive system to one that can anticipate future needs, and that digital intelligence and flexibility will be critical to that shift. He will join Gerhard Christiner, CEO of Austrian Power Grid, for the opening ceremony keynote at Enlit Europe, which runs from 10 to 12 November at Messe Wien in Vienna.
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