Along with its normal task of ensuring stable electricity supplies for homes and businesses across the city, Da Nang Power One Member Company Limited (Da Nang PC), over recent times, has promoted the provision of electricity services on digital technology platforms, thereby helping its customers access the best experience of electrical services, through latest apps.

Promoting digital transformation helps Da Nang's electricity industry improve service quality. Da Nang PC staff are seen working on an automated system

PC Da Nang has approved its high capacity in developing its own solutions, namely researching and building an automated system for smart distribution grid in Da Nang, and developing a system for looking up meter readings, warning on online power output, and analysing the efficiency of the installation of rooftop solar photovoltaic panels.

Thanks to these above-mentioned solutions, PC Da Nang was one of the honourees in the category of Excellent Digital Transformation Business at the Viet Nam Digital Awards-VDA held by the Viet Nam Digital Communications Association in October 2020.

With the aim of enhancing the quality of customer care services and improving labour productivity, Da Nang PC has built a smart grid development plan for the 2015 – 2020 period, an active response to the national government-approved strategy on developing Smart Grid in Viet Nam (Smart Grid Road Map).

Mr Vo Hoa, PC Da Nang Deputy Director, said, since September 2016, the company has put into operation the Da Nang Grid Control Centre, with an average of approximately 2,000 remote controls per year.

That has brought about a remarkable effect, reducing the operation time, ensuring switching equipment of the electrical substation, shortening the maintenance and troubleshooting time of the electrical substation, hereby helping to reduce the duration of power outages. This also marks an important step in modernising and automating the Da Nang power grid as previously planned.

Currently, the Da Nang Power Grid Control Center is fulfilling data exchanges with the Central Regional Load Dispatch Centre and the Central Power Corporation Supervision Centre, in tandem with ensuring the remote control over the operations of two 220kV transformer stations owned by Power Transmission Company No 2, thus creating closer links between relevant units in Central Viet Nam’s power sector.

At the same time, Da Nang PC has promoted the construction of a modern close-looped voltage grid with a stable operation.

Recently, a project for building distribution automation system (DAS) for a vision towards a smart distribution grid in Da Nang, developed by a group of talented engineers from the Da Nang PC won the top prize in the ‘Initiatives for the Community 2020’ 2020’ national-level programme held in December 2020.

The DAS has successfully been applied at the Da Nang Power One Member Company, making the company the first of its kind in Viet Nam to put this smart system into operation in fully automatic mode.

For the sake of self-healing grid and reliability improvement of medium voltage (MV) distribution networks, fault location, isolation and service restoration (FLISR) is one of the most beneficial and desirable applications of DAS.

Thanks to DAS, in case of a problem detected on the grid, customers in the affected area will only experience a power cut during the time the automated system operates, about 11-22 seconds, as compared to any power failure lasting 30 - 45 minutes as normal.

If an incident occurs on the Da Nang grid, the automation system will be activated and operate automatically without operators’ intervention.

The system automatically calculates, analyses and identifies the faulty grid area, emit signals to control the switches on the grid with the aim of isolating this area.

By late 2022, PC Da Nang will have completed the automation of 100% of the 22kV feeders.

In addition, by August 2019, PC Da Nang had completed the installation of electronic meters connected to a remote data collection system for all customers in the city, many years ahead of the deadline set by Viet Nam Electricity.

The electronic meters provide higher accuracy and can help monitor power consumption, resulting in power savings. They are also integrated with communication technologies to support remote automatic meter reading.

Data collection by this method helps to monitor the operation status of substations and cables, and improves grid safety.

By HOANG LINH – Translated by A.T