Rappahannock Electric Cooperative (REC) sought insights into system line losses beyond basic purchase and sale of kilowatt hours. In an effort to understand the losses and gain the ability to accurately identify losses at a granular level, the analytics team embarked on a line loss analytics partnership with Burns & McDonnell.

The project was comprised of two key efforts: Engineering Analysis and Data science analysis. During the engineering analysis, distribution engineers and data scientists worked together to create or modify distribution models and processed data to extract necessary equipment ratings and electrical characteristics which were used in a data-driven evaluation of technical losses from each of the models simulated. The purpose of the data science piece was to provide further insight into the system level losses from assets external to electrical impedance and saturation losses. For this step, the team took a deeper investigation into the relationships between SCADA, AMI, MDM, unmetered loads, and possible energy theft through bulk data analytics and algorithms.

The outcome of this project provided REC more actionable insights into the different functions of load and losses indicative of their system, resulting in alignment of core systems for a precision approach to reducing losses in the future. Join us during this presentation to learn about the analytic journey that produced dashboards for REC, leading to an accurate and in-depth understanding of their system losses and significant reduction in wholesale costs to their members.