Mobile power equipment: Its impact on power supply reliability

Mobile power equipment is an important measure to reduce customer outages. It enables power-uninterrupted repairs and maintenance. It can be added to the networks to quickly restore power service after fault occurrence and hence reduce power outage time. This paper presents the results of a project recently performed within the Smart Grids R&D program at the power company Vattenfall, in Sweden. The project analyzed, among other things, the effect of using mobile power equipment on power supply reliability based on the outage data and statistics from Vattenfall network company in Sweden. The results show that there is big potential in reducing outages and increasing reliability of power supply. By using mobile power equipment combined with LW (live working) methods, interruption-free work in both station environment and on power lines can be performed. This will potentially eliminate planned outages up to 90% and hence significantly improve the utility's power service reliability.