ABB VD4-CS and Southern States CapSwitcher: A Side by Side

If you are in the renewables industry and involved with capacitor switching and the procurement of 38kV capacitor switches, you know there are issues: issues with reliability, issues with availability, issues with on-time delivery, and more. The number of vendors supplying switches at this voltage level are limited, and the introduction of a new capacitor switch, incorporating new technology is welcome. For many years, NEPSI has been using ABB’s standard vacuum and SF6 breakers in our 38kV metal-enclosed products for switching capacitor banks, harmonic filter banks, and shunt reactor banks. These breakers perform well with no recorded restrike events or failures. They are perfect for small single-stage and multi-stage banks that only require small transient inrush reactors. However, they are not well suited for larger multi-stage systems that require large transient inrush reactors for back-to-back switching. In such cases, NEPSI and others in the industry had no choice but to use technology incorporating SF6 and pre-insertion resistor technology from Southern States. ABB saw this void in the marketplace and has answered to it with the development of a VD-CS breaker with special features: it utilizes servomotor actuation and vacuum interrupter technology to provide flawless synchronous closing control of capacitor banks to 40 MVAR (per stage) at 34.5kV. As we have done with many other ABB components, NEPSI has integrated this VD4 with special features into our metal-enclosed product offering. It is now available in single-stage and multi-stage designs. Contact NEPSI to learn more. With expertise and collaboration, ABB and NEPSI continue to improve upon the metal-enclosed solution. www.nepsi.com