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The opening up of the railway to competition in Europe has been accompanied by many technical challenges never before seen in the railway field. One of these challenges concerns precise energy metering. As European railways have been a monopoly until now, the current systems can only measure the energy consumption of a single operator. In accordance with European law, the installation of an energy meter has been mandatory in new or refurbished rolling stocks since 2014. Nevertheless, these energy meters are still not fully reliable, with misreadings and missing readings being common occurrences. To address the problem of energy metering data reliability, this paper presents a method for validating the reading measurement based on a physical model and validates it in two different case studies. For the issue of energy metering data availability, different estimators are developed, and their performance are shown with the aim of calculating the missing consumptions for both case studies. Finally, the paper suggests how these methods may be implemented in other types of trains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the cross-sectional results of analyzes of authentic conducted disturbances introduced into public power networks by various types of loads installed at end users. The foundation for the research was a set of 260 identified cases of Power Line Communication (PLC) transmission disturbances based on the Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP) technology, which were recorded in the urban network of the distribution system operator covering over 400,000 smart meters. The paper presents a quantitative assessment of the share of loads that most often cause problems with transmission efficiency. Moreover, a qualitative assessment of the detected disturbance cases was carried out in terms of conditions relating to the structure of the power grid and real transmission levels and disturbance levels. The authors made a pioneering analysis in the so-called “communication path” where the PLC communication disturbance was identified, i.e., from the installation point of the PLC concentrator to the metering point where the energy meter, with which the connection was lost, was installed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014 a number of Capacitor Voltage Transformers (CVTs) exploded in the Swedish transmission grid. To address this problem, data driven methods for continuously monitoring CVTs were developed. Thanks to these methods, CVT capacitor punctures are now regularly noticed and addressed before causing serious damage. This paper describes the algorithms used to make this possible. Detecting all CVT capacitor punctures as they occur increases the transmission system stability, avoids equipment damage, lowers risks to personnel when visiting the substations and makes it possible to correct measurement errors in the energy measurement systems. Automatic supervision scripts, using energy meter data, are running continuously and will alert the service personal immediately when problems occur. With the algorithms proposed in this article, the Swedish National Grid (Svk) has detected many old punctures and expects no future capacitor punctures to go undetected. Detecting all new punctures enables Svk to save substantial future cost since planned actions now are possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]