A few weeks ago, I asked for information on anything that could be used to monitor power flow, and installed as a self-contained system, mounted on a pole, out on a power line anywhere instead of located at a substation.
Since then I have found links to several items that look like they could be useful for down-line monitoring. Here are the links I found that seem most useful.
First of all, there's an article in Transmission and Distribution World called
Line Intelligence Feeds the Smart Grid. They explain some uses that an electric distribution utility has found for such equipment, but they don't provide any brand names or specifications on exactly what equipment was used.
The big companies, such as
Siemens and
Motorola, have pages explaining their ability to do whatever a customer might like done in the smart-grid arena. (The Motorola link is the same one I posted already in another reply.)
Here is the
S&C ScadaMate switch, an automated remote-control switch with monitoring, that smallgreek referenced above.
Cooper Power has a simlar automated switch for medium-voltage lines. It can monitor current, voltage, power factor, and harmonics.
Cooper M-Force Switch
And here is another company that has nice-looking brochures for switchgear, monitoring, and control including automatic reconfiguration, but I think they are based in Saudi Arabia:
Lucy Gemini
There are also some newer products from smaller companies that seem to offer a competitive solution:
This
system from Airak has all required sensors, and electronics to interface with a standard ethernet or fiber connection.
The
GridSense LineIQ seems to have everything - sensors that don't need a separate power supply, and a terminal unit with local or remote communications options. The company has experience in the higher voltage transmission arena, but this product is intended for either transmission or distribution.
Lindsey Manufacturing Co. sells an
all-in-one crossarm mounted power monitoring system. It comes with communications and custom software, but it is unclear what protocols it supports, if you would like to interface with your own communications and/or a pre-existing SCADA system.
Other Lindsey monitoring products
Telemetric sells sensors and remote terminal units (RTU), but only for cellular-communications. They don't seem to have any other communications options, such as ethernet, fiber, or serial port. If you do want to use cellular, their RTU has generic inputs that can be used with anyone's sensors.
Again I am re-posting a link from my previous reply. This one seems to be just the sensors, without any communication option. Although it looks like they do have their own custom solution for communication, again it is unclear whether it is interoperable with other standards. They still seem to be in the evaluation phase, for marketing this system, and they are asking for pilot project partners. The interesting thing about these sensors is the range, from 5 to 20,000 amps, which allows them to be used both for normal-operation monitoring and for fault-locating.
Current and voltage sensors from Seeco, which can be used with or without a Seeco remote-controlled switch.
Seeco system overview.
Field Metrics sells components for accurate current and voltage measurement, with a wireless link to RTU or computer. To use this for remote monitoring, you would need to provide an RTU with wireless link to the sensors, and another communications link back to your office.
Here's another new company that sells only the sensors:
M-Tech Line post sensor transducer system.
I listed a bunch of sensors without Remote Terminal Units. Here we have an RTU without any sensors, that might work for this application:
Valquest VQ7
Or, if you want to build a truly custom solution, you could start with the integrated circuits and build your own RTU. Here is a
Maxim waveform sampling IC with a fast enough sample rate to monitor 60 Hz AC waveforms.
