Summary
When floods hit Serbia during May and consequently September of 2014, restrictions in electricity supply were a realistic scenario for almost 900,000 people. The most affected sector that required recovery and reconstruction financing was energy, where damage to the power supply and distribution facilities was estimated at 181.6 million EUR. Over 90% of the damage was in the coal and power generation sectors, power distribution and transmission, natural gas, and district heating.
The floods heavily affected the EPS generation capacities, drastically reducing coal production and jeopardised security of electricity supply. To provide for security of supply and decrease the risk of instability, it is necessary to ensure mobile electrical equipment and proper medium voltage distribution automation systems. In case of an emergency, mobile substations can be plugged into the electricity network within 3 hours so that maintenance and revamping can be carried out at both 110 kV substations and 35 kV or lower voltages, without turning the customers’ power off.
The said equipment is strategically placed in the most vulnerable region of Central and Western Serbia, where the most affected municipalities are. The headquarters are in Kraljevo and the operations are conducted through 10 regional branches. The proposed areas are mainly rural and very often, during winter months’ outages, it takes maintenance utility people days in the mountain to find cause and fault location since all grid works were performed manually on site. Many locations are not accessible during natural disasters.
Based on experiences of developed European utilities this project improves the grid significantly and provides customers with higher quality power supply. Digital packet data radio systems in frequency bands enable fast and reliable telecommunication infrastructure which contributes to distribution medium voltage grid. As for the mobile substations, they will be kept on designated locations with the aim to reach most efficiently any location throughout Serbia.