Advantages of GIS technologies

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: With increasingly complex power networks based on sophisticated engineering techniques, power equipment must meet increasingly stringent system requirements to ensure reliability, safety and power quality. The switchgear is at the heart of these networks and plays a vital role in the transmission and distribution chain.

Very simply put, the switchgear is the basic equipment deployed to control, protect, and regulate the flow of electrical power in a transmission or distribution network. It is often located in substations, but can be associated with any electrical equipment that might need to be isolated for maintenance purposes or fault correction. The main components of the switchgear are circuit beakers, which interrupt high-voltage current to protect electrical equipment from excessive current.

In conventional air-insulated switch-gear (AIS), live conductors are separated by air. In gas-insulated switchgear, the live parts are encased in a sealed chamber filled with gas. Gas has far more effective insulating properties than air, enabling a huge reduction in the distance separating the live contacts, and a much smaller footprint for the substation. The casing ensures that the main equipment is protected in a sealed and unpolluted environment, thereby making this compact technology safe and reliable.

The state-of-the-art gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) technology offers other advantages, such as high system availability and reliability, as well as enhanced safety, making it a smart and economic solution for power transmission and distribution utilities, industries and commercial complexes.

To summarise, GIS technology has some basic advantages which include enhanced system reliability which offers protection against ambient environmental influences, such as humidity, dust, foreign bodies, light etc, which could harm materials. Thus it cannot affect the live conductors and their electrical fields as these are in hermetically sealed, gas-filled compartments.

Then there are aspects related to operator safety. With protection from external environmental influences and the hermetically encapsulated, gas-filled compartments, the probability of internal faults is minimised. Unintentional and unauthorised access to live parts during operation or work on the system are prevented by the design. The switchgear has all-round metal protection against accidental contact. This protection cannot be removed when the equipment is in use, even unintentionally. This makes GIS an ideal solution from a safety perspective.

Yet another advantage is its compact design. Due to the compact gas-based technology design, the systems and components, as well as the buildings in which the equipment is housed, can be kept extremely compact.