The Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport (BEST) has decided to revamp its entire system and adopt advanced technologies including SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system, to better serve its power consumers. Under the new system, any failure in electric supply will be communicated automatically to the ‘control room’ through an internal server. Consumers no longer need to complain, sources said.
All BEST power consumers will be mapped on its Geographic Information System (GIS) network. Hence, in case of a ‘fault’ in the power supply of any building/ outlet, the same will be restored remotely from the control room, within a few minutes. “If all goes according to plan, the implementation of the proposed new system will be started in this financial year and will be completed within four years in a phased manner,” said a BEST official. Currently, around 10.5 lakh Mumbaikars get their power supply from the BEST. On average, 100 to 125 power faults are reported daily and this number doubles during the monsoon.
Currently, in a power outage (due to fault in supply), consumers of the affected building are required to alert the control room and are forced to wait till officials from the electric department reach the spot and repair the fault. Sometimes, this takes hours, but with the new system, such problems can be remotely resolved within five minutes, from the control room.
“SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) architecture will continuously check for faults and their locations by using wireless fault detector units deployed at various feeding stations,” said a BEST official, adding that once the new system is functional, the connections of all consumers of BEST will be integrated and in case of power failure in say, ‘X’ building, the consumer control room will be alerted by the system. The new system will also suggest an option for the temporary restoration of power supply to the affected building/ consumer. Thus, power supply to ‘X’ building will be immediately restored temporarily and remotely, from the control room. In the meantime, the system will also alert the concerned department about the repair of the said fault. Once the fault is repaired, the system will again alert the control room for the restoration of the power supply to the affected building/ consumer, as per the original schedule.
“The new system will improve the continuity of power supply by restoring services quickly after the occurrence of faults,” said a senior BEST official, adding that timely recognition of faults will avert equipment damage and continuous monitoring and control of the distribution network can be performed from remote locations.”
“Apart from this, the new system will also save labour costs, by eliminating the manual operation of distribution equipment and reduce the duration of the outage by system-wide monitoring and generating alarms, so as to address problems quickly,” the BEST official added.
Asked about the cost of the project, a BEST official said, it would be approximately Rs 3,400 crore, and include meter replacements for all consumers and the renewal of around 1,000kms of an aging cable line in the city. Of its 11,000km-long cable lines in the city, around 10,000kms are in good condition, the official said.
"We want our customers to get services best as per the global standards and we are working towards that" said Lokesh Chandra, general manager of BEST .
