To describe the experience of the roll-out of smart grids in Castellón, I’m going to start by talking about it in the first person. I’d also like to remind more than one person of the bets they made, because although the challenge we faced a couple of years ago seemed insurmountable, we managed to make it!
We started the mass-scale roll-out in June 2010. The goal was to develop the smart grid for the whole town of Castellón in a year. This involved 100,000 points of supply and 600 remotely managed transformer stations, of which 60 were automatic. It was also necessary to supervise medium voltage in over half of them.
How would we manage to achieve it? Not only did we have to hope that the team would complete the task, but that the plug & play system would work properly. The Project Office had worked on this new approach for some time in order to simplify and break the former model down into procedures.
We had to cope with new equipment that would be analysed in a controlled roll-out context and with which we were barely familiar. The early days were filled with thousands of doubts, uncertainties and questions, to which we fortunately found the answers without delay. The first installations proved that the plan the company had designed as the smart grid model was technically feasible.
It was photos here, calls at unholy hours there, discharges that took longer than scheduled and customers asking themselves what was going on at that transformer station that nobody had ever given a second glance, and which was now receiving a continuous flow of visitors.
Once the technological uncertainties had been cleared up, the biggest challenge we faced was the logistics and how to coordinate the project. What we had initially been able to manage with pen and paper and some ever-increasing Excel spreadsheets now required tools and systems to coordinate all the work: from planning to validating the equipment in situ, to programming, coordinating and setting everything up.Image may be NSFW.
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Once the roll-out was launched, our practical experience was vital in accelerating improvements in the equipment. Over the years, we have gone through continuous adaptations in different aspects: the functionalities of communications, the meters, the supervision and automation.
The team I work with is doing fantastic work, as well as all the other areas of the company, which give us assistance and cooperation. We are grateful for the collaboration of departments such as Telecommunications, Metering, Reading, Systems, Maintenance, Planning, Operation, the Zones, the Support Channels, Protection, Standardisation, Prevention and Training. The plan for communications with institutions, bodies and customers has also been a success. If they hadn’t given us the green light to do the job, none of this would have been possible! Without a doubt, Castellón showed that the model worked.
Now we have overcome a second challenge, consisting of training the other Iberdrola regions to enable knowledge transfer and roll-out to commence in other areas. Our next goal is to consolidate the upcoming maintenance model, in which the electronic components of our installations are becoming similar to the electrical ones. In order to achieve this, we are working to ensure that our work is more straightforward, faster and more effective, by looking to implement standards, procedures and IT applications for support and management.
