Transmission-grade prediction with the New York Power Authority

The challenge: incipient faults on critical transmission assets

The New York Power Authority operates critical transmission assets — including the Y-49 cable, a 23-mile, 693 MW submarine link under Long Island Sound. Faults on assets like these are among the most expensive events in any transmission system: locating and repairing them can take weeks, and every day offline matters for the region’s supply.

NYPA wanted to know whether faults could be seen coming — with as long a warning horizon as possible, and without installing anything new.

Submarine-cable fault prediction from existing sensors

The collaboration began through the EPRI Incubatenergy Labs 2021 program, applying IntelliView® to historical measurement data from the Y-49 cable. The initial study showed that incipient cable faults could be predicted up to two months in advance at 80% confidence — rising to nearly 99% within 24 hours of the fault.

On the strength of those results, IntelliView® went into service in October 2021, monitoring cable, reactor and transformer banks — using NYPA’s existing sensors.

Transmission fault prediction results

• Nine faults predicted in advance in continuous service
• Warnings up to three weeks ahead of the fault
• Every warning delivered with predicted cause and likely source

Why warning time matters on transmission assets

Transmission is where warning time is worth the most: vessels, crews, spare parts and outage windows can be scheduled instead of scrambled. And it is proof that IntelliView® works at transmission scale, on the sensors a TSO already owns.

The complete results are documented in the final project report (PDF).