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Fault indicating devices such as fault indicators (FIs) have been widely used in distribution systems to improve reliability and reduce outage duration. Recently, FIs with communication interfaces are integrated into distribution automation (DA) to further reduce fault-finding time by reporting FIs' statuses back to control center. When faults occur, a lot of alarms and fault information are received from Outage Management System (OMS), Trouble Call System (TCS) and Customer Information System (CIS) and are shown to system operators. As a result, the identification of faulted line sections in a wide-ranging distribution system from FIs' statuses is not an easy task, especially when multiple faults occur simultaneously and/or distributed generators (DGs) are connected. An automatic and fast faulted line-section location method for distribution systems based on FIs is proposed in this paper. The line sections between adjacent FIs can be treated as a possible fault location (PFL) and the fault current detected by the FI can be considered as line current (LC) flowing between the adjacent PFLs. A relationship matrix between PFLs and LCs is then derived and used to design the proposed automatic and fast faulted line-section location method. The faulted line sections can then be located effectively and efficiently by the proposed method. Test results for an actual distribution system demonstrate the validity of the proposed faulted line-section location method.

The paper develops and implements a novel fault indicator for distribution automation to achieve significant and immediate improvement in reliability and hence service to the electricity customers. The proposed fault indicator is designed based on ZigBee communication. ZigBee has been designed to possess general-purpose protocol with low cost, low power consumption and self networking; and therefore, it is very suitable for constructing the communication network in distribution automation and therefore smart grids in the future. A fault detection and identification system is also designed to find out the fault location effectively and efficiently after a fault occurred. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed system.

The installation of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is looked upon as a bridge to the construction of smart grids; especially, while most of the power meters are still mechanical ones without digitization. An AMI consists of smart power meter, communication technology, meter data management, and associated software and hardware. After AMI has been implemented, many advanced functions e.g. automatic and accurate reliability calculation systems can be achieved. Therefore, this paper tries to develop an automatic reliability system for AMI. A ZigBee-based smart power meter with outage recording function is designed first. The ZigBee-based power meters are used to transmit the detailed power consumption data and outage event data to rear-end processing system periodically. According to the detailed and accurate data stored in the rear-end database, an automatic and accurate reliability calculation system can be designed sequentially. The customer interruption costs can also be estimated by the proposed system. Experimental results show that the proposed system has great potential to be integrated into AMI to improve the accuracy of reliability calculation.

Many governments deploy ubiquitous IT project, which aims to combine the latest wireless network and wide-band technologies etc. to accomplish a ubiquitous wireless communication network. The ubiquitous wireless communication network can be utilized for the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Therefore, this paper tries to use the new wireless communication technologies to design and implement a ZigBee-based smart power meter. An outage recording system is also designed and embedded into the smart meter. The microcontroller of Microchip dsPIC30F series is used to develop the proposed smart power meter. A ZigBee system is then deigned and integrated into the proposed power meter, and used to transmit the detailed power consumption data and outage event data to rear-end processing system. The proposed smart power meter cannot only be used for power consumption data collection but also for outage event data recording. The proposed system has great potential to be used to build the area-based AMI. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed system. Besides, the application of ZigBee communication in power area may, expectedly, lead to make a definite contribution to ubiquitous IT project.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) system is looked upon as one of the top ten important technologies in the 20th century. In the upcoming years, the public area applications are the key issue in developing RFID. Power system is innately bulky, wide-spreading, and is, definitely, an extremely important application area of RFID. In the power area, the RFID can be implemented on apparatus management, procedure control, power consumption management and personnel access control. Additionally, RFID can be applied extensively to customers. By integrating RFID into a power meter and outage recorder, the power consumption data and power reliability information of customers can be fully collected and recorded. This paper tries to design and implement a RFID-based power meter and outage recording system. The microcontroller of Microchip dsPIC30F series is used to develop a small-scale power meter and outage recorder. The proposed RFID system is then embedded into the power meter and records the power data in tag. Due to the uniqueness of RFID tag, the power consumption data and outage information of customers can all be recorded and then be identified in the rear-end processing system. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed system.