KESTREL: Knowledge, Evaluation, Systems, Technologies for the Reduction of Electricity Losses

Our vision is to deploy large numbers of low-cost measurement devices to form a network providing information informing electricity companies and other large-scale users:

* about where they can reduce electricity system losses to help with CO2 reductions and EV, heat pump, renewable generation and other low carbon technology integration; * to improve fault detection location, thus helping restore service to vulnerable customers and others; and * to support other network management activities.

There are many proven approaches to the problems of electricity-based losses, overloading and security of supply (although these are often resource intensive, slow and with limited accuracy). The first steps are typically to identify the particular parts of the systems most affected in order to determine both the causes and the most appropriate and economic solutions to deliver the greatest commercial and societal benefits.

In practice, it is necessary to separate out the technical (joule) losses from those arising from issues with commercial operations such as metering, billing and theft - itself a process fraught with complexity. Increasingly it is also necessary to understand when such losses occur and not just the average over time as their critical impact on plant loadings and capacity occurs at peak load times and is non-linear (a 25% increase in loading due to losses producing a 50% increase in the thermal loading of plant, cables and lines -- which, in turn, increases system losses even further).

The increasing connection of various forms of intermittent distributed generation and storage further add to the complexity as at times they can change the direction of load flows and both reduce or increase overloading and losses as well as having a profound impact on the local carbon intensity of the energy supplied.

The main motivation for this project is to provide an electronic measurement product which can form a network of sparse remote low-cost monitoring for locating, visualising and where relevant producing time-profiles of: * areas with poor access and security of supply; * technical losses in real time;

* areas with high commercial losses; * local carbon tracking; * available and exceeded capacity, power factor, unbalance and harmonics; * areas with under or over voltage; * automatically generated network circuit connectivity and impedances; and * locations of fault (target accuracy of less than one span) and overloaded circuits.

Project Kestrel is a collaboration between Create Innovation Solutions Ltd., Loughborough University, Queen's University Belfast and ASH Wireless Electronics Ltd. The project will undertake a 3-month feasibility study to produce and test a highly accurate timing device capable of facilitating the calculation of losses, fault detection and network event location using voltage phase angles and event timing measurements.