NYPA Keeps Power On With Iron Dome Tech

This was Tel Aviv just a few weeks ago. The night sky lighting up as Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system powered by AI tracked and intercepted thousands of incoming rockets. It's a technology best known for its role in warfare that's now gaining traction in a very different space. Utilities, where it's used to prevent events like this. Oh my God. What is that? That looks gnarly. Look at the sky. Well, that doesn't look good. Those are the reactions after an electric transformer exploded in Queens, New York in 2018. A common occurrence in the States due to an aging electric system and a grid under new pressures due to renewables. A transformer is really a tank filled with oil and what you're doing is you have its coils that are wound around and this is very high voltage. So you're creating a condition which, if not monitored properly, can cause significant damage. A transformer costs about $5 ,000 a piece and they're critical to the transmission of electricity. The New York Power Authority understands that well. The utility suffered two major explosions in 2012 and 2014 that together cost $5 million in damages. It knew it had to do something. turned to a company called Empress to develop its own version of the Iron Dome. What the Iron Dome system does, it doesn't only shoot an anti -missile at a missile, but it also predicts where that missile will fall. So if the missile is being shot and it's going to fall into the sea or into the desert, there won't be any response from the anti -missile system. And one of the things that we were able to do together with M -Press was to come up with an advanced monitoring system that was able to predict when and if we would have issues with our equipment. In 2015, the New York Power Authority partnered with M -Press to develop an asset control system for transformers. M-Press is the Israeli software company behind the Iron Dome. It took two years and nearly $3 million to bring the solution to market. Initially, it was used at two plant sites. Today, the software company. monitors around 50 transformers statewide. Transformers, when they're having problems, can start to create different signatures. Some of those signatures actually come in the form of the gases that come out of a transformer. In the early stages, the New York Power Authority worked with the Electric Power Research Institute to further understand dissolved gas analysis monitoring and how it can be used to detect transformer issues. They used the sampling of gases to then create an algorithm that, when combined with data collected from sensors... offers a comprehensive view on the health of a transformer. The software they developed with us kind of did two things. It started to look at those warnings. It started to insulate the operator from the meaningless ones and started to ultimately drive out the warning signs that were really predictive in nature, meaning something soon was going to happen that was not going to be good for that transformer. Now, if you start to show some potential problems, of course, The question is, what can you do? Well, you can reduce load, you can have a different switching operation, you can take that transformer offline. M -Press leveraged its anomaly detection algorithm, the same one used in the Iron Dome, here in the utility space to detect transformer issues. It integrates with existing systems and pulls information using AI to make decisions in real It will automatically react to problems, instantly shutting down a transformer and rerouting power for problems detected. Not too much. different from the way the Iron Dome reacts to threats. Now really what makes this partnership so interesting is the way it kicked off the New York Power Authority's digitization efforts. The New York Power Authority is the largest public utility in the United States and is on a mission to become the country's first all-digital utility. We have one goal in our reforming the energy vision strategy. One very important goal. goals but one very critical goal which is to increase the capacity utilization of our power grid to increase its system efficiency this is a look at one of the ways that goals come to life the new york power authorities isoc a smart integrated operation center it was established in 2017 and this is where employees monitor in real time the 16 power plants and 1400 miles of transmission lines and is where operators will get real-time alerts on the health of Transformers. The ISOC pulls in information from nearly 100 ,000 sensors deployed on generation, substation and switchyard assets. Since 2017, the New York Power Authority has been building out a communication backbone to support the sensors. The New York Power Authority largely runs off 700 miles of fiber optic cables and is also in the midst of testing a private LTE network with Nokia in some parts of the state. It didn't take long for the New York Power Authority to see the benefits of the ISOC. In just five months after it was created in 2017, the utility said it saved $5 million in day -to -day savings and avoided $170 million in suboptimal investments. It's the kind of benefits the Biden administration now wants to take mainstream. My American jobs plan will put hundreds of thousands of people to work, laying thousands of miles of transmission lines, building a modern, resilient, The Biden administration wants to dedicate $100 billion to grid upgrades, and it could include Israeli software companies. Israel and the U .S. will fund $4 million to support the innovation of Israeli companies developing clean energy technologies, and the Byrd Foundation will help to support that. This is the same way that M -Press Solution came to life, and it's really what incentivized the New York Power Authority to think outside the box in solving a- a costly and challenging issue. I think it's a matter of merging companies that you can work with, who have the knowledge that you don't have, and sharing what we have to build a better system, better equipment, better monitoring, and better safety and security. For more coverage on the utility of the future, be sure to stick with Current Insights, and if you have a question on this story, hit the button below.