Customer:
Formed as Alaska’s fifth rural electric coop in 1945, Homer Electric Association (HEA) consists of 25,900 member-owners and 2,542 miles of energized line over a 3,166 square-mile service area on the Southern Kenai Peninsula.
Its hydro power plant can only be reached by daily two-seater flights to where the hydro-electric dam operates on Bradley Lake, on an island just across the bay from city of Homer.
Challenge:
Besides being located in an extremely remote location, the HEA team was having difficulty locating an elusive ground fault that was detected by a charger on their system for over two-years. It wasn’t until the customer reached out to its rep firm, McKaig Evergreen, who in turn reached out to Eagle Eye Power Solutions, that it was able to finally address this issue head-on with some outside expertise.
Options:
While there are always options to address the wide range of issues concerning utilities, looking first to its trusted rep team at McKaig Evergreen seemed like a great place to start.
Solution:
Scheduling an onsite training with the utility, Eagle Eye Power Solutions sent two Eagle Eye University instructors to Homer to address its concerns. As the instructors conducted training, they started asking questions about the elusive fault:
- How old was the facility?
- The plant was 12-15 years old.
- How old were the chargers?
- They were swapped out just 2 years ago.
- What type of chargers were they?
- Dual SCR chargers.
- Where were they located?
- On the same DC Bus (400A).
- Was the output the same on the two chargers?
- No, it wasn’t the same – one was leaking power. That could be the source of the problem.
A further examination of the DC bus would be needed to help better understand if this was truly the cause of the fault.
Implementation:
Viewing an as-built diagram of how everything was laid out in the plant, it was determined that the team would need to get in full personal protective equipment (PPE) gear to open the cabinet and look at the bus. This would also require them to take one of the chargers offline. Rather than doing this, the HEA team waited for their next scheduled outage in February 2025 to examine this as the source of the ground fault.
Results:
Using the GFL-1000 DC Ground Fault Detector & Locator as instructed by the Eagle Eye University trainers during the outage, the Homer Electric team effectively diagnosed the source of the ground fault within minutes.
