The past two weeks I've been working on constructing a work plan for a small cooperative. This cooperative has a model, built in WindMil, however no load has ever been exported from the billing or AMR into the model. It looks like it just has load allocated using the REA method (a method popularized by the Rural Electrification Authority 50 years ago, which is fairly accurate and distributes kW demand based on kWh usage) with substation loading distributed amongst the line sections.
As with many other tasks in engineering, a work plan requires good information input to get good information output. Getting these data (specifically system information and billing load) from the customer or your employer is vital, and will require strong personal networking and ties. I’ve learned that getting them to understand the accuracy and vitality of these numbers is not easy, but will pay off big in the long run.
Currently I’m trying to determine the ordering of “most important” to “least important” system improvements, which is difficult for me to do as the model is telling me that in many locations customers are seeing very low (in the 108V to 109V range) voltage. It seems that the engineering task at this point shifts away from scientific or objective, to a more artistic and experience based approach which is pretty challenging and pretty fun.
