UK: Global PD Testing and Monitoring in Renewables Energy Market

HVPD have over 8 years of experience in the insulation condition monitoring of land-sea export cables, offshore wind farm subsea cable arrays and offshore platform interconnection cables.

Over this period we have carried out insulation condition testing of these assets using the following condition assessment techniques:

•  Off-line/Commissioning Testing of new cable installations. HVPD have experience in testing with VLF (Very Low Frequency), Damped AC/Oscillating Wave (OWTS), Resonant Test Systems (RTS) and partial discharge (PD) testing during 24 Hour Soak Tests.
• On-line Partial Discharge (OLPD) Testing and Monitoring to detect and locate pre-fault PD and tracking activity in in-service MV & HV cables.
• Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) to provide ‘TDR signature’ of cables and to detect and locate cable faults after they have occurred

Many of these past projects were carried out further to insulation failure and subsequent earth faults on these high criticality cables. Such faults have led to unplanned outages, downtime and lost revenue for the wind farm operators.

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Press release, April 15, 2013; Image: hvpd