Is a V-Trail suitable for planned network outages and switching works?

This is a strong fit, and it is where the platform has seen its most substantial utility deployment. Essential Energy operates V-Trail units for this purpose, and Ausgrid has completed specification acceptance for the platform.

A towable stand-alone power system lets a network maintain supply to customers during planned works that would otherwise require an outage, vegetation clearance, pole replacement, conductor work, substation cutovers, protection upgrades.

The value is in three places:

Customer minutes avoided. Planned outage minutes still count. Supplying affected customers from a deployable system during the works converts a notified outage into no outage, which shows directly in reliability performance.

Schedule freedom. Works that must be scheduled around customer impact, night works, weekend windows, seasonal restrictions, can sometimes be moved into normal hours if the customers are supplied by other means. That is a labour cost saving as well as a delivery-rate improvement.

Emergency substitution. The same asset used for planned works is available for unplanned events, which improves utilisation on an asset that would otherwise sit idle between programmes.

Two design questions to settle before the first deployment: DNP3 integration into your SCADA, and the switching and isolation arrangement at the customer connection point, which needs to be agreed with your network operations group rather than improvised on the day.