LoRaWAN - Long Range Wide Area Network

Our Datacom & ACC team is looking to deploy a wireless, low-power IoT network on substations for asset monitoring and predictive maintenance use cases. ELIA / 50Hertz substations contain numerous assets to be monitored for effective operations, safety & uptime. Pulling both power & network cabling to monitor assets is often both in practical & cost-prohibitive : sensors monitoring the assets should be wireless & battery-powered. A study was done on low-power wireless IoT networks in 2023 and the known use cases were compared to the abilities of these networks. A private LoRaWAN network came out on top. 1 use case in particular is driving the adoption of this network which is the SF6 gas monitoring for GIS substations. The monitoring of these assets should be rolled out across 71 substations across 4 years. Each substation contains between 50 and 200 assets to monitor totaling 5.000 sensors to be deployed.