Improvement of Electricity Distribution with Satellite Telemetry

Smart Grid brought great benefits to the electric energy segment by monitoring smart meters and protection devices, making electrical distribution more reliable, and improving the quality of the service provided. The problem is that not all points, that needed to be monitored, have achieved highly reliable and available monitoring coverage.Initially, radio was used as a communication technology. Later, other technologies were added, such as optical fiber and cellular. Over time, these technologies started to present significant problems, like saturation, high installation costs, and operation, frequent maintenance, in addition to starting to fail at critical moments or did not reach a high degree of availability, mainly outside the urban region.The deployment of satellite telemetry terminals directly in the field equipment to be monitored and the use of M2M (Machine-to-Machine) networks with L-band, has emerged as a low-cost alternative, improving the reliability and availability of communication channels with Distribution Operation Centers, in regions without coverage or bad coverage, reaching a high percentage of availability of the communication channel.This presentation highlights the successful case of using the telemetry satellite terminal in electricity distributors in Brazil and Latin America, after 5 years of using the solution.