In recent years, the company Endesa has worked jointly with the Barcelona City Council on a city plan to boost the electrification of demand and respond to the current and future needs of the Catalan capital. This objective, which is key to accelerating the decarbonization process and fighting to combat climate change, is accompanied by a package of actions that, in the last two years alone, amounts to an investment of more than 90 million euros.
As a distributor of an essential service, Endesa's operations serve to guarantee supply with the construction and renovation of infrastructures and ensure their quality with the incorporation of new technologies. A purpose, the latter, that involves increasing the digitalization of the electrical grid –in high, medium and low voltage– and preparing the infrastructures to face the digital city of the future.
The plan to accompany the city in its growth and transformation "is very ambitious," according to the head of Endesa's distribution area in Barcelona, Marcos Lalueza, who specifies that the necessary actions planned for 2023 will also be around 40 million annual investment.
He explains that the city has become a key piece to progressively transition from the current electrical grid to the digital one and thus gain in security and reliability of service to all customers.
By volume, the Barcelona electrical network is a "good test bed for new technologies that are designed in the company's development center on Avenida Vilanova and that end up being exported to our parent company, the Italian multinational Enel, which implements them in other countries," explains Lalueza.
He argues this because Barcelona is a city that is betting on digitalization and that is in constant transformation with new urban planning areas and, therefore, the electricity distribution network is extensive. Endesa has 7,000 kilometers of lines extended to reach 900,000 supply points, almost a quarter of the 4.2 million existing connections throughout Catalonia.
Endesa leads the change in infrastructure operations and the electrical grid from Barcelona"From Barcelona we are leading the change in infrastructure operations, with a global vision for the multinational, to have an intelligent network, what we callsmart grids, with automation, digitalization and artificial intelligence," he specifies. "We want to accompany the growth and transformation of Barcelona," he states.
From high to low voltage
In this sense, several actions stand out. On the one hand, in high-voltage substations, sensors are being installed for remote control and online thermography is being incorporated, a technology for predictive-preventive maintenance of electrical distribution lines and systems, since it allows visualizing temperature patterns. One of the latest renovation actions of these infrastructures has been carried out in the Penitents substation, where 2.8 million euros have been invested.
Endesa has a total of 24 substations in Barcelona, some of which only serve Barcelona, but others are located in areas bordering other municipalities and provide shared service to more than one population.
In the case of medium voltage, the electrical grid has 7,000 transformation centers in Barcelona (about 130,000 in Catalonia) and each one supplies an average of 200 points. Currently, one in three centers (35.7%, double the national average) is already digitized with installations that operate with remote control. These actions began in 2016 and almost 26 million euros have already been invested. With these systems, the user's waiting time for the resolution of an incident or lack of supply has been reduced by 20%.
Likewise, sensors are also being installed (60% of the centers have already been covered) to receive information on the load received by the transformers and, therefore, to know the intensity passing through the network. This allows processing data and performing historical statistics to design new preventive actions. In fact, new functionalities are being worked on to have greater control over electrical fraud and overloads, among others.
The LARS system, a technological advance
These advances have made possible the design and implementation of the LARS system (Fault Location and Supply Restoration) in Barcelona. It is an automatic system that, in case of a fault, functions as a virtual operator and, from the Control Center's own system (just as human operators would), performs the necessary maneuvers in the network to isolate faults and restore supply in less than three minutes. LARS is responsible for managing remote controls and will do much more in the future, the company assures, as work is underway to integrate historical data, street works maps, and weather forecasts, among others.
Using Big Data and artificial intelligence techniques to process all this information will determine, in the not too distant future, new forms of energy distribution. Hence, these technologies are also designed for low voltage, where this 2022, 140 actions are being carried out throughout the city, which are added to the 164 intervention points in 2021 to reinforce, expand, and further mesh the network.
Using Big Data and artificial intelligence to process information will determine new forms of energy distributionThe existence of smart meters also provides data to the company. "We are working on several systems that process the information they provide us to be able to determine the what and how of a fault and also to be able to maneuver remotely to resolve incidents. In low voltage, we will also need to implement pilot tests in Barcelona, of course," says Marcos Lalueza.
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