COMET 2016

COMET 2016

On October 25-27, 2016, CEM hosted the third annual conference on Condition-Based Online Monitoring of Electric Assets (COMET) at the AT&T Conference Center. The conference cost was underwritten by Austin Energy. This conference brings together utility employees and suppliers of monitoring equipment to advance the science and technology of detecting incipient failure events in grid equipment. The topic is important because the catastrophic failure of high power equipment causes disruption due to lack of electricity over a wide area. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the legacy grid is an aging infrastructure.

An emerging area of discussion this year was utility worker safety. It is obvious that no one should be in the vicinity of high power apparatus as it fails. It is likely that the emerging procedures for an indication of near term failure would be to evacuate the area while powering down the suspect piece of grid apparatus. The power down time may take as long as a half hour to not cause load interruption. Two years ago, it was impossible to predict failure with such precision. The required precision is still rare, but the broad benefit is becoming compelling. The benefit is expected to spur further developments.

Shannon Strank was the lead UT representative on the organizing committee.  Liz Arredondo and Roy Peña were instrumental in making the conference run smoothly. Angelo Gattozzi chaired a session, and Bob Hebner was the conference chair.