Low Cost Data Acquisition System for Electrical Secondary Distribution Network

摘要

Lack of efficient acquisition of power consumption data in Electrical Secondary Distribution Network (ESDN) is one of the major challenges facing the Tanzania Electric Supply Company and other utilities in developing countries. Despite its huge importance in the planning, forecasting and general management of power distribution, data acquisition is currently done using manual and estimation methods. The readily available solution is smart meter which faces affordability issues, the study proposes affordable multiuser acquisition system formed by sensing nodes equipped with Zigbee modules for routing data from acquisition points to a gateway where they can be routed in bulk to utility’s center station for storage, analytics and further processing. The system was developed and then deployed, the analysis of the performance and the cost of the system approves the feasibility of the acquisition system both in terms of cost reduction and performance.