PROGRAM CUSTOMERS RECEIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICES TO IMPROVE RELIABILITY
Cantega’s customers seek our expertise with wildlife mitigation solutions when they have an issue. A planned roll-out of a system-wide protection plan will deliver the best reliability performance improvements in the long run.
Cantega has tracked deployments at several of its largest customers and has determined that the biggest impact on reliability comes from customers who have a plan and have deployed extensively on their systems. Improvements of 95% to 100% in outage mitigation have occurred at two of our largest customers over a ten and seven year period, respectively. A long-term staged plan has proven most effective.
Wildlife legislation exists in both Canada and the United States, and in some regions, takes (incidental killing) of any species must be reported. Outage reporting can be tracked through the Cantega RTS Platform as well as the programming for a wildlife mitigation program as identified below. By working with Cantega, customers are able to document outages while Cantega investigates the root causes and contact points. Cantega will then make recommendations on individual sites or system-wide improvements for a specific problematic class of equipment.
Further, the Avian Power Line Interaction Committee (APLIC) provides Avian Protection Plan (APP) Guidelines which can further enhance a comprehensive wildlife and avian protection program. The list below describes a sequence of services that Cantega provides to help customers optimize their wildlife mitigation program.
Cantega can assist with the following elements of a comprehensive wildlife mitigation program:
- 1. Inventory all system substations and assets;
- 2. Establish engineering standards for cover-up deployment;
- 3. Evaluate current level of coverage in place relative to engineering standards through site audits;
- 4. Determine gaps between standards and existing coverage;
- 5. Based on geography and history of contacts, identify problem stations and locations;
- 6. Determine reliability goals, evaluate historical cover-up spend, and prioritize substation or asset deployments over time;
- 7. Commence Site Assessments and roll-out project plans for deployment;
- 8. Build Site Protection Plans and gain consensus on levels of coverage against engineering standards;
- 9. Deploy solutions; and
- 10. Conduct post installation audits to make sure protection is properly applied.
A Solution Approach
The key elements of a successful program involve analysis, reporting, planning, designing, training, deployment, and evaluation – an all-encompassing solution approach. This is Cantega’s management principle when it comes to preparing a solution for a customer. Once a station is imaged, Cantega develops a detailed Site Protection Plan as its guideline to ensure that the analysis and photo modeling of a substation considers all the risk points. From there, we closely review and modify the recommendations based on customer feedback from the station and management perspective. The portal is our means of communication between all parties to make sure the end solution will deliver the highest improvements in reliability.
Based on annual budgets, outage histories, and program history, Cantega can work with its customers to optimize their avian and wildlife protection plans to make sure a program roll-out addresses problem stations and problem equipment types across the entire system.
Site Protection Plans
