mFCLs act as the grid’s firewall, protecting electrical equipment from damage caused by power surges. Zenergy’s mFCLs ensure a continuous power supply, while mitigating fault currents. Easy to maintain, and with a low footprint and low energy usage, they are a cost-effective solution for today’s multi-sourced energy networks, allowing them to operate closer to full capacity and thus meet the increasing global energy demand.

Substations are designed and built to handle the normal current load (steady state) plus a substantial additional capacity to cover potential fault currents.  As electrical usage increases, substations eat into this fault capacity to the point where the substation can become dangerously overloaded unless upgraded.

When a mFCL is installed at a substation that is running close to it’s design capacity, the potential fault currents that can pass through the mFCL to the substation are reduced thus avoiding the expensive option of upgrading the substation.

mFCLs can also facilitate the connection of ‘distributed generation’ (DG) to the grid. With many substations running close to capacity, new connections from DG power sources (such as wind, combined heat and power, solar, etc) are often not allowed to connect because the local substation has has insufficient fault headroom to handle addition current.

• Renewable energy: Facilitates the connection of renewable energy sources (wind farms, biomass, etc) to distribution and transmission grids, by reducing their fault current contributions, thereby facilitating compliance with fault level restrictions required by grid operators.

• Improved performance: Allows the paralleling of transformers, leading to even loading and redundancy; there is no interruption of the feeding transformers when the mFCL reduces the fault current, which leads to increased reliability; increased operational flexibility (e.g. closed bus section and bus couplers); the reduced network impedance from coupling bus bars increases system stiffness and voltage regulation; power quality is improved by the reduction of voltage sags.

• No interruption of the feeding transformers: When mFCL operates to reduce the fault current, thus leading to increased reliability.