Case Study: Tennessee Valley Authority achieves faster degraded voltage analysis and motor starting with ETAP

TVA cuts DVR analysis from 50 hours to less than 1 hour with ETAP

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) faced a challenge in efficiently analyzing its electrical power systems for compliance with federal nuclear safety standards. Traditional manual methods for degraded voltage relay (DVR) analysis were extremely time-consuming and prone to error, generating over 18,000 pages of data per evaluation. To address this, TVA utilized ETAP's etapPy™ Python API and its Motor Starting Module to automate the process and improve accuracy.

ETAP delivered a solution that used Python scripting to automate the complex simulations. By employing less than a hundred lines of code, ETAP's integration enabled TVA to run studies and evaluate results on demand. This resulted in a dramatic reduction of analysis time from approximately 50 hours to less than one hour and condensed the output from over 18,000 pages to a concise 12-page report, providing significant time and cost savings.

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)