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Who this is for
Protection and control engineers, operations managers, and reliability engineers at electric utilities needing to reduce fault investigation time and support NERC PRC compliance requirements.
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Fault Analysis
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Overview
System faults are inevitable on an electric grid. Lightning, equipment failures, vegetation contacts, and animal intrusions cause faults daily. What separates utilities that manage faults well from those that do not is how quickly they understand what happened and why — because the cause determines whether the fix is a fuse replacement, a relay setting change, a vegetation work order, or a capital replacement. VigilantGrid compresses the time from fault occurrence to engineering understanding from hours to minutes by automating the data extraction, processing, and presentation that engineers previously did manually.
Before VigilantGrid, investigating a fault meant driving to the substation, logging into the relay, downloading the fault file, transferring it to the office, loading it into specialized software, and then finally beginning analysis — a process taking two to eight hours depending on distance and relay access. Engineers doing this for every fault in a day have very little time remaining for the engineering judgment the process is meant to support. VigilantGrid extracts fault data automatically the moment an event occurs from every connected relay simultaneously. By the time an engineer opens their laptop, the fault location is calculated and the relay operation is already classified.
What’s included
✓Automatic fault data extraction from connected SEL, GE, ABB, Schweitzer, and other relay manufacturers
✓Fault type classification: phase-to-phase, phase-to-ground, three-phase, line-to-line-to-ground, and high-impedance
✓Fault location calculation displayed on Power-View GIS map for immediate accurate field crew dispatch
✓Protective relay operation sequence analysis: correct operation, misoperation, and no-operation classification
✓Event-triggered COMTRADE waveform capture and browser-based engineering review interface
✓Historical fault database by feeder, circuit, substation, and equipment class for systematic trend analysis
✓Automatic fault notification to engineering and operations personnel with event summary and map location
✓Fault report generation in standard formats for engineering review, management reporting, and NERC PRC-002 compliance
Standards & regulatory compliance
This service directly supports compliance with the following standards and regulatory frameworks. GridIntel documentation is structured to generate compliance evidence as a byproduct of normal operations.
- NERC PRC-002 disturbance monitoring data requirements
- NERC PRC-012 relay loadability review and documentation
- IEEE C37.111 COMTRADE standard for fault record exchange
- NERC FAC-002 event analysis and misoperation reporting
- IEEE 1159 recommended practice for power quality monitoring
Estimate your value
Adjust the sliders to match your organization and see a rough estimate of the value this service can deliver. Results are illustrative — contact GridIntel for an analysis specific to your situation.
Key benefits
Why organizations choose GridIntel for Fault Analysis
“VigilantGrid just saved me a week's worth of time by identifying exactly where the RTU automation code had an error. — OT Technology Supervisor, Small Cooperative”
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