Five years in service: 64 faults predicted in advance at Vaasan Sähköverkko

The challenge: from reacting to outages to preventing them

Vaasan Sähköverkko, the distribution system operator for the Vaasa region in Finland, wanted to move from reacting to outages to preventing them — using the measurement infrastructure already in its network. Together with ABB, the goals were concrete: reduce the number of supply interruptions, sharpen fault localization, isolation and restoration, and shorten the interruptions that do occur.

Fault prediction from existing relay recordings

IntelliView® was commissioned with ABB on two rural distribution feeders at the Petalax substation, reading disturbance recordings from the network’s existing relays — no additional sensors, no new field hardware. The explainable-AI approach was central from the start: every prediction shows how the conclusion was drawn, so the control room can verify the reasoning instead of trusting a black box.

In the initial pilot phase, 67% of faults were accurately predicted one week before they occurred, with 91% of false alarms avoided. After several successful pilot projects, ABB chose to proceed with Eneryield’s solution — and later joined as a strategic investor.

Five years of results

The deployment has been in continuous service since October 2020 — the longest-running IntelliView® installation. Across those five years, the two feeders alone produced more than 80,000 disturbance recordings, roughly 44 every day. Out of that stream:

• 64 faults were predicted in advance
• Warnings arrived up to three weeks before the interruption
• Predicted root causes agreed with operator findings in 88% of cases

Why it matters for distribution reliability

This is the reference that answers the question every utility asks: does it keep working outside a pilot? Five years of unbroken operation, on ordinary relay data from ordinary rural feeders, with warnings long enough to turn callouts into planned work.