Satellite, GSM communications drive efficiency in Namibia's electricity network
[Johannesburg, 27 January 2012] -
NamPower, Namibia's national electricity utility, has slashed the costs of dealing with temporary outages by using GSM and satellite communications to link remote recloses with its head office.“We had a situation where if there was a power outage in a remote town or farm, a technician would have to drive all the way out to the site just to flip a switch back on,” says project leader Elana Joubert. “During the rainy season when there were a lot of lightning strikes, some of our technicians were sleeping four hours a night. It was a huge drain on our human resources as well as being financially expensive.”NamPower awarded a contract to Metacom, a South African company that had already developed a nationwide monitoring and control network for Eskom. “We wanted somebody with a lot of experience in dealing with our specific issues,” says Joubert.
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