Clearing the way for green energy

In order to supply southern Germany with green electricity from large wind farms in the north of the country in the future, underground extra-high voltage cables are being laid over hundreds of kilometres across the country. HIGHVOLT has developed an innovative monitoring system to continuously monitor the underground power transmission. It uses Azure cloud services to process large amounts of data in real-time, enabling faster and more accurate localisation of cable faults. In collaboration with SoftwareOne, a solution architecture was designed that also allows for the future integration of AI algorithms for predictive maintenance.

HIGHVOLT is a partner of many transmission system operators in Germany and other countries and is one of the leading suppliers of measuring, testing and monitoring systems for power grids worldwide. The company supports the expansion of the high-performance extra-high voltage lines “SüdLink” and “SüdOstLink” in Germany, which are completely constructed as underground cables.

To solve the challenge of maintaining and locating faults on direct current lines up to 700 kilometres long, HIGHVOLT has developed a unique system called HiMON® in partnership with the German Technical University (TU) of Dresden. HiMON® uses special sensors to monitor the transmission quality of power cables during operations and can locate faults more precisely and quickly than by traditional methods. With the future use of AI, HiMON® should be able to predict cable faults, enabling predictive maintenance and preventing outages.

To be able to collect and analyse the accumulated data in real-time, the HiMON® monitoring solution required an appropriate software architecture. It was developed by SoftwareOne based on various Microsoft Azure services, such as Azure IoT and Azure Kubernetes Service.