How it works

The Advanced Transformer Load Monitoring outcome provides near real-time (every five minutes) information about the loads and voltage at service points on a distribution transformer. The data is sent to the back office operational applications such as SCADA Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition or an ADMS Advanced Distribution Management System. This data helps with real-time state estimation, load flow analysis, and managing the distribution network. The Advanced Transformer Load Monitoring outcome also provides transformer daily load and voltage statistics to the back office for non-real-time analysis.

This version of Advanced Transformer Load Monitoring is designed for the brownfield population. A brownfield population is defined as a nonhomogeneous meter population of Riva and other non-DI Distributed Intelligence meters with GenX NICs. To compute and provide this information, the Riva meter polls the non-Riva meters behind a transformer over RF radio frequency-mesh network and aggregates all meter data on the same transformer. The Riva meter pushes aggregated transformer load and voltage values to the back office on every reporting interval. There is a programmable on‑accumulation period during which the agent waits to receive all the meters' data before it sends that data to the back office. The data that gets sent up to the back office is timestamped for the period during which that data was sent by all the meters. It is not the date and time that the data was received by the reporting meter.

Brownfield Advanced Transformer Load Monitoring requires the Location Awareness application to be licensed, configured, and running on the Riva meter. The Location Awareness application agent pushes information to the ActiveTransformerMonitoring agent. The ActiveTransformerMonitoring agent analyzes the metrology data from the meter. The ActiveTransformerMonitoring agent sends the data to the application where the data is collated, and the application displays the data. From all the meters on that transformer, the agent is aggregating what the actual load is for the distribution transformer. The agent sends the aggregated value to the application at specified intervals.

The ActiveTransformerMonitoring agent supports both greenfield (100% Riva) and brownfield (mix of Riva and GenX NICs) deployments. The agent is configured from the back office with metadata about the NICs that it should communicate with. It uses APIs provided by the host meter to communicate with NICs, retrieving metering data to support the Advanced Transformer Load Monitoring agent load and voltage use cases.