Finnish Digita launches power line monitoring

DIGITA, a nationwide LoRaWAN operator in Finland has launched POWERGRID IOT, a power line monitoring solution for TSOs. POWERGRID IOT is developed on top of OPENREMOTE, a leading IoT platform solution.

Climate change is increasing extreme weather conditions and stress on critical infrastructure such as overhead power lines. Storms and increased rainfalls cause erosion and failure risks to power grid structures. In wintertime the accumulation of ice and snow adds tremendous weight on power lines that can lead to structural damage or shortcuts. Such incidents also tend to happen in locations that are hard to reach so locating the point of failure is also important. 

Power distribution companies have been looking for a solution to be able to proactively prevent slowly developing faults before they cause severe problems and repair sudden events such as fallen trees on power lines as soon as possible. LoRaWAN technology with low-power and long-distance communication capabilities provides means to solve those challenges also in a cost-efficient way.

DIGITA POWERGRID IOT, a power line monitoring solution for TSOs, is a cloud service which visualizes and provides alerts from overhead power lines using smart Line Sag Sensors. These sensors are installed on the overhead lines and send accurate angle and temperature data to POWERGRID IOT cloud application provided by DIGITA. The solution is jointly developed with OPENREMOTE, also leveraging their professional service offering.

The key benefits of POWERGRID IOT solution are the cost-efficient outdoor sensors with up to 10 years operating life and the scalable cloud solution with smart analysing tools. The increased visibility to the overhead power lines status and accurate positioning of sudden incidents brings fast return on investment. POWERGRID IOT solution can also be extended to monitor other vital infrastructure in power distribution networks, such as transformer cabinets.

“We had been looking for a scalable, commercially available IoT platform where we could develop our own POWERGRID solution. OpenRemote’s IoT cloud platform provided a solid foundation for our own application development to enable line sag sensors to monitor power lines 24/7 and provide valuable information and alerts based on smart rules generated in the application. In co-operation with OpenRemote’s skilled team we were able to implement the required functionalities for overhead power line monitoring solution in time before the incoming winter.”, says Jarkko Miettinen, Product Manager at Digita.

“The solution Digita offers, is a perfect example where IoT Technology combined with a country wide LoRaWAN network can bring a cost effective solution to an otherwise expensive maintenance problem. Digita offers cost efficient preventive maintenance to power lines for any TSO. The POWERGRID IOT offer is also a perfect match with the features in OpenRemote’s IoT platform as well as with development and managed services we were able to offer Digita”, says Pierre Kil, CEO of OpenRemote.

DIGITA is presenting POWERGRID at ENLIT Exhibition, Frankfurt Germany, 29 Nov – 1 Dec.

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