Electricity Asset Management Plan 2019-2029
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Vector Limited://
Vector is currently trying to secure access to the installed base of advanced meters to minimise the investment in its own LV network sensors. We are currently working with the meter owners and the retailers who under the regulations are the only party who contracts for the meters and who by virtue of their contracts, control, to a large extent, access to these meters.
Vegetation Management Vegetation Management is described in more detail in Section 4.1.8.
Customer Options to Improve Resilience Customers now have individual ways of improving resilience, thanks to existing and new technologies, whose costs are steadily reducing. These include:
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Mobile on-site generation Permanent on-site generation
• Renewable generation with on-site energy storage • Standalone energy storage • Solar and battery storage solutions • Innovative Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) solutions that use the energy stored in an electric vehicle, so customers can supply their home with energy during an emergency such as a storm-caused outage 4.1.3 OUR NETWORK PLANNING STRATEGY Our planning strategy ensures the network can meet our objectives for creating a new energy future. It takes into account the megatrends affecting the electricity industry, in particular the rapidly evolving technology and digitalisation. To this end, we have engaged in scenario planning to better understand the impact of the uncertainty surrounding the key inputs, influencers and other variables that could affect our future network. At the same, our planning strategy also focuses on meeting our SoSS reliability and resilience objectives, and other service-level obligations – and at optimal cost. We have also forecast the electricity growth expected to arise from new customer connections that will typically be met through the construction of new zone substations and feeder lines. Where forecasted demand is likely to exceed the capacity of our present assets, resulting in a breach of SoSS, the capacity constraints are being addressed. The timing of the investment is aligned with expected time-frames when capacity in a geographic area, or of an existing substation, is expected to be exceeded. Our scenario modelling shows the likely growth of our future energy load. Inputs into the Symphony scenario forecast a steady uptake of both solar and battery installations, and a rapid uptake of electric cars over the ten year planning term of this AMP. Ongoing energy efficiency gains (for example, efficient home insulation, LED lighting and the use of heat pumps) is expected to continue. The outcome painted by this scenario forecasts the network peak demand growing by seven per cent over the ten year period. To meet this increased demand, Vector has looked at increasing the capacity of existing assets or adding new assets such as zone substations and distribution feeder circuits. It has also investigated alternative technology and load control opportunities. Distributed generation and other DERs (with homes that feed energy into the network being one example here), smarter distribution technology and advanced analytics are all providing new options that offer greater choice in how we plan and implement our future network. Traditional security standards are based on 100% redundancy on urban 11kV distribution networks. In the event of a fault, we can use switching on the network to isolate the faulty section and restore power to the remaining healthy sections. To achieve this level of redundancy, often referred to as deterministic based planning, the network must be constructed to supply not only the primary load, but also the backup load. We follow a different approach, namely probabilistic based planning. Our analysis of fault data shows that the likelihood of a fault at peak times, and the resultant impact on customers, are not the same across the network. By accepting that the likelihood of fault at peak times is small we have adopted a distribution network security standard which offers slightly less than 100% redundancy. By example, through our security of supply standard we offer 100% redundancy on residential urban feeders for 95% of the year (98% for predominantly commercial feeders). This has minimal impact on our customers by way of increased outage frequency or duration, but it has a significant benefit in terms of reducing network expenditure to cover off the few brief periods of the year when we experience peak demand. This approach has reduced investment in the network over the past two decades by deferring reinforcement upgrades without impacting the customer experience. We are continuously refining this approach given new and emerging technologies. As such we now use Incremental Probabilistic based planning, where energy storage is utilised to meet growth in peak demand to further defer subtransmission investments (for example
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