Key Benefits

• Early warning – Supports operators in early cable fault or damage identification, enabling early intervention, avoiding costly outages and unscheduled maintenance.
• Cost-effective – A low cost / high return solution for monitoring health, damage, and degradation in power cables and their joints and terminations, regardless of their number distance.
• Prevents failures – Models cable and accessory health and behaviour to guide proactive maintenance far in advance of failures.
• No maintenance – Uses passive sensors which operate over distances of up to 60 km from the substation and do not require control power, maintenance, or recalibration.
• Easily deployed – Small, non-invasive, and easy to retrofit. Works with any HV cable – underground or subsea (i.e. solid-bonded and cross-bonded cable architectures).

Challenges for power grid operators

• Cables are vital assets, but joints are remote or inaccessible to monitor
• Outage cost and reputation damage is significant
• Conventional condition monitoring is expensive, inefficient, and insufficient to spot damage, and is a lagging indication of insulation failure

DAS

£0.2 – 0.3M

Relatively expensive, limited cable fault detection capabilities

DTS

£0.1 – 0.2M

Does not target joints or terminations

ROV

£0.4 – 0.8M

7-day survey to locate deviations, not continuous

Online PD

£0.2 – 0.3M

Requires control power and data networking, produces false positives, late identification of failure