How TDG Accelerates Innovative Electrical Substation Design

The world’s power utilities are developing at breakneck speeds to electrify our world. Tasked with generating and distributing power, overloaded utilities juggle grid maintenance and capital project expansions. However, designing substations, selecting equipment, and constructing power infrastructure requires years and millions of dollars. As inflation pushes up costs, power providers must balance affordability with the need for significant changes in operating, maintaining, and extending their grid.

Recent news stories have covered artificial intelligence’s ability to write funny stories and create mind-boggling images. However, Transcend has harnessed AI technology to transform the electrical substation preliminary design process. The Transcend Design Generator (TDG) is a tool that enables power utilities to design transmission, distribution, and collector substations in-house at ten times the speed of traditional engineering methods.

Let’s say, as part of a sustainability initiative, your utility engineering team uses TDG to design a wind farm’s new collector substation. The experience would go something like this:

1. Core Power System Design: TDG develops the basic electrical architecture of the substation by incorporating project requirements that you enter through a web based interface in less than 5 minutes.

2. Equipment Selection: Once the TDG architects the connection of the major electrical equipment, each piece of equipment has its required electrical specifications defined. When integrated with your preferred equipment database, the tool then selects specific make and model components for use in the design.

3. Engineering Drawings: Organizing engineering drawings and revisions across disciplines complicates project management. TDG generates and simultaneously adjusts interrelated mechanical, structural, and electrical engineering designs. Using a combination of the system architecture and equipment specifications TDG quickly and accurately generates Single Line Diagrams and various Plan drawings including the General Arrangement Drawing.

4. Building Information Model: TDG integrates with Revit and other BIM software to automatically generate and visualize the preliminary design using a 3D model. You get the model so you extract even more data and value from your preliminary design.

With the help of AI, Transcend makes substation projects simple to design, builder-design, procure and construct. TDG democratizes preliminary design by giving power utilities the time to visualize substation infrastructure quickly, avoid delayed capital projects and optimize design outcomes for the communities they serve. Demo the TDG today to experience the future of substation design.