S&C’s Lateral Reclosers Help Utility Meet Brazilian Regulatory Requirements

Customer Challenge

COPEL, located in the state of Paraná, is the fourth-largest utility in Brazil. Its distribution system consists of 195,459 kilometers (121,452 miles) of lines serving about 5.1 million customers across 395 cities and 1,113 districts, villages, and settlements. The network includes 3.5 million homes, 82,000 industrial plants, 382,000 commercial establishments, and 360,000 rural properties.

When Brazil renewed its utility concessions contracts, the country’s national regulatory agency, ANEEL, imposed stringent regulatory requirements on the utilities. The agency enacted System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) and System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) performance thresholds to measure the utilities’ ability to meet the concessions contracts. These index thresholds posed major challenges for many Brazilian utilities because they had to meet them to avoid financial consequences and potential loss of their contracts.

As a result, COPEL was required to decrease its SAIDI performance relatively quickly, mainly in its rural-service areas, which had the poorest reliability. Reducing SAIDI motivated COPEL to search for new solutions that would enable it to meet ANEEL’s requirements while in turn reducing operating costs and providing a return on investment.

S&C Solution

Targeting rural laterals with the poorest reliability, COPEL conducted pilot projects in the towns of Maringá and Cascavel. The utility sought to compare potential single-phase reclosers from a few manufacturers and examine their field performance to determine which strategy would best address ANEEL’s requirements.

Having used S&C’s switchgear and smart grid solutions for years, COPEL was interested in S&C’s TripSaver II Cutout-Mounted Recloser, which provides an advanced lateral-protection strategy that detects whether faults are temporary and restores power automatically when they are. COPEL was also particularly impressed with the TripSaver II recloser’s visible drop-open feature, along with S&C’s technical support and reduced installation time.

During testing, two sets of TripSaver II reclosers deployed on three-phase systems avoided 62 truck rolls in Maringá and 83 truck rolls in Cascavel. Upon careful review of the single-phase reclosers, COPEL chose the TripSaver II Cutout-Mounted Recloser and a second recloser from another manufacturer for a larger-scale, second pilot. The purpose of the second phase, with approximately 1,000 units from both manufacturers, was to evaluate longer term field performance.

Results