Eskom, the South African electricity utility, once again hosted the biennial Southern African Power System Protection Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa from the 12th to 14th November 2008.

The conference was yet again fully subscribed with 350 delegates attending the two and a half days. An exhibition ran concurrently with the conference with 17 suppliers exhibiting electrical protection and related equipment. Both the conference and exhibition provided a valuable opportunity for attendees to see new equipment and hold discussions with technical experts from international and local companies.

The 350 registered delegates included 225 from Eskom, 30 from twelve different overseas companies and the remainder from local suppliers, industry, municipalities, consultants and academia.

The keynote address titled “Overview of asset management in Transmission” was given by Mr Willy Majola, General Manager in the Transmission Services Division of Eskom. The keynote address focused on the rationale behind asset management, the various stages in the asset management process, and an overview of the current status and future direction of Eskom Transmission in terms of the overall asset management process. Mr Majola indicated that effective asset management is an optimum balance between cost, performance and risk and a 10 to 20 year view of operating and capital expenditure plans are needed in order to make optimized decisions. Customers, the regulator and other stakeholders must also be convinced that investment decisions are based on sound, scientific and repeatable evidence.

Following the keynote address, thirty one technical papers were presented over the two and a half days. The papers covered:

• Generator, transformer and feeder protection
• IEC 61850
• Cyber security
• Testing & relay modeling
• System stability mitigation techniques, fault recording and data management
• Series compensated line protection
• Current transformers
• Arc flash protection
• Single battery applications

The ‘Best Presentation’ Award, the criteria of which are technical content, quality and audience interest, was won by Professor Michael Fette of System & Dynamik for his presentation of the paper entitled “Collapse protection relay CPR-D - Theory and Applications - Implementation into SCADA systems to support security stability assessment”.

The next Southern African Power Systems Protection Conference will be held in November 2010.