Remedy for faulty Walvis Bay substation transformers
Namibia: NamPower has revealed that its engineers and technicians have found a remedy for the ever-malfunctioning transformers at the Walvis Bay substation.
Image source: New Era
Namibia: NamPower has revealed that its engineers and technicians have found a remedy for the ever-malfunctioning transformers at the Walvis Bay substation in the Erongo region.
The team has designed a reliable automatic voltage regulation (AVR) solution for the coastal town’s substation transformers.
“They discovered a potential solution involving the functional extension of the already-installed SEL 2411 transformer monitoring device to implement voltage monitoring and on-load tap changer control,” NamPower said in a statement.
The company detailed that the device regulates and keeps the voltage on the load side within an acceptable margin, while also ensuring equal transformer loading during parallel operation and blocks tap changer operation under abnormal and system fault conditions to prolong the lives of transformers.
According to NamPower, the failures were not only observed at the Walvis Bay substation but also at other substations namely Okapya and Kuiseb.
The power utility has also maintained that the Walvis Bay substation is a very important station, as it has a three-fold role in the region with its heavy energy-consuming industries such as mining, fishing, and tourism, among others.
Meanwhile, according to NamPower, the major problem was the lengthy turnaround time of repair, which takes almost a year, thereby leaving the burden on power system controllers and operators to manually monitor and regulate the voltages of these transformers.
Source: New Era