Top Innovators
Luke Benedict, Dustin Nace, and Dave Reino represent the Underground Automatic Transfer Switch team at PECO.
PUF's Lori Burkhart: Describe the innovation that led to your team winning the Florence Fogler Top Innovator Award for Transmission Tech, how it works, and what the benefits are to PECO.
Dave Reino: The device is essentially an underground automated sectionalizing switch that we use on our system for PECO. As it stands right now at PECO, we don't have much underground automation or automatic sectionalizing on the primary portion of our distribution circuits. It's all manual switches.
The innovation idea was centered around trying to bring something on system that PECO could have line of sight between the field and our Operations Control Center, something that could restore customers more quickly, and is obviously safe for our crews to be able to use.
That was the concept for what brought about this equipment.
The device is a fifteen-kilovolt rated, three-way switch with vacuum break interrupters, so it uses air to extinguish an electrical arc. In addition, it has control equipment with it; relays that we can perform testing on, and do the settings ourselves, so it can operate in a way that can work on our system. The specific switches that we put on our system are automatic transfer switches.