Learn How TVA Uses etapPy™ for Degraded Voltage Analysis and Motor Starting in Nuclear Plants

Our agenda will be to talk about the challenges that face every nuclear plant in the United States, about power and power quality, the available solutions within ETAP to meet those challenges, some of the key values that those solutions provide, and then finally wrap up about the benefits and costs of each of those solutions.
---------------------------------------------------------------------By Ms. Preston Cooper, TVA, ETAP Nuclear Utility User's Group

This case study shows how to use specific ETAP script software to evolve electrical analytics for the nuclear industry. These analyses and calculations are mandatory when starting and operating electrical machines in the nuclear industry.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility corporation in the United States.  The Tennessee Valley Authority provides low-cost electricity in seven southeastern states and provides flood control, navigation, and land management for the Tennessee River system. With a generating capacity of approximately 35 gigawatts (GW), TVA has the sixth-highest generation capacity of any utility company in the United States and the third-largest nuclear power fleet, with seven units at three sites. In addition, they also operate four coal-fired power plants, 29 hydroelectric dams, nine simple-cycle natural gas combustion turbine plants, nine combined cycle gas plants, a pumped storage hydroelectric plant, a wind energy site, and 14 solar energy sites.

Location: Knoxville, Tennessee

Year: 2025

Making Voltage Analyses in a speed and guaranteed way

Challenges

  • Resignation from manual or semi-automatic methods for analyzing a degraded voltage relay (DVR) condition.
  • Finding sure tools to speed electrical calculations, comply with nuclear standards, and work in the full scope of voltage drops.
  • Developing specific analysis scenarios to reflect realistic motor starting conditions.
  • Delivering understandable and condensed reports to electrical and non-electrical audiences, facilitating decisions.

Which solutions do they choose?

Selected applications

They chose etapPy™ to create their scenarios to develop the capabilities of the used ETAP software.

As a company managing nuclear energy production, they have used ETAP for many years. 

Why do they use Etap?

Main Customer Benefits

  • Reducing the time required to complete the DVR analysis report, and scenario correction according to the actual grid model.
  • High-quality analysis reporting with an optimal dose of information.
  • Easy Python usability with a special ETAP dashboard.
  • Easy to generate similar scenarios by using copy and edit functions.

What do they think about ETAP?

Opinions

ETAP does provide an easy way to combine the study cases, the revisions, and the configurations into repeatable studies. These scenario Wizards can be set up to combine all of the variables as necessary for each of these required computations.
By Ms. Preston Cooper, TVA, ETAP Nuclear Utility User's Group

Any typical evaluation of a nuclear plant could generate well over 18000 pages per the criteria that you're looking at. Using Python can take a little less than an hour to run some of these [scenarios] and to create the Excel spreadsheets.
By Ms. Preston Cooper, TVA, ETAP Nuclear Utility User's Group



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