Downtown Area Underground Automation

To reduce restoration time and increase outage location accuracy Oshawa Power partnered with a global leader in electrical engineering to develop a system for underground distribution infrastructure in the City’s core that would use advanced technologies to automatically locate faults and reroute power, minimizing the number of customers effected by an outage.

This project involved creating a self-healing grid by installing automated switches and controls in 15 vault rooms and implementing a communication infrastructure that connects to the control room via the utility’s dark-fibre network.

The longest an outage will occur is less than a minute.

When a power occurs the system will reconfigure itself to isolate the outage down to a minimum size and time. The longest an outage will occur in the downtown area is less than a minute.

Although the efficacy of the system has been proven in Europe, this is the first system of its kind to be installed, tested and put into service in North America.

this is the first system of its kind to be installed, tested and put into service in North America.