Streamer develops Colombian market

EPM Colombia, one of the key energy suppliers in Colombia, decided to develop this pilot project in 2017. At the end of 2017, 70 SAi20 and 33 SAd20 were delivered to this South-American country. The total length of the power line equipped with those devices, is 7.5 km.

According to Mikhail Zhitenev, the installation faced no difficulties besides the fact that the power line passes through a forest area, so not all poles were accessible with a bucket truck. This LLPDs installation was very specific, as the installation training was done online from Russia. Almost all Streamer Technical Department was involved to provide the operational support to the client: some have filmed a training video, some have prepared drawings & 3D models, that helped to install all these brand new products in the best possible way, others have prepared mathematical model of equipment, that helped to choose best available deployment scheme. Moreover, the installation process was guided by Armando Portalanza, Regional Product Manager, who instantly brought all the information received from St. Petersburg, to the local staff and translated it into Spanish.

As a result of such well-coordinated work, at the end of December the power line was successfully equipped with LLPDs.

"It's a rare practice for Streamer to organize installation trainings online, but in the future we will do it more often. We are actively developing foreign markets and it's impossible for installation specialists to be everywhere at once", Mikhail Zhitenev said.

According to Mikhail, in the end of February Streamer received a photo report on the equipped line. In just two months, five operations of one-time indicators were recorded, three of them on one tower. This means that installed products have prevented at least three lightning impacts, one of which was a direct lightning stroke.

Nowadays there is an ambitious 44 kV project under development in Colombia. Its implementation strongly depends on operational performance of SAi20 and SAd20 near the city of Medellin.

Same as most countries in Latin America, Colombia is rich in natural resources. It has rich oil, gas, and coal reserves, as well as the hydropower potential. 30% of Colombian electricity is generated by CHPs, remaining 70% by big amount of Andes-located hydropower plants. Power generated by the Andes HPP is brought to the main network by an extended number of 13.8 kV and 44 kV power lines. Due to relatively low basic insulation level, these OHLs are exposed to a big number of outages caused by atmospheric overvoltages.