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www.us-tech.com Streamlined HMI Key to Substation Automation Rollout By Stephen Armstrong
tion, faced an ongoing challenge of efficiently managing its large and geographically dis- persed network of substations. Without an ability to remotely monitor substation per- formance or receive notifications from remote equipment, personnel had to travel to substations for various issues, which delayed response times and issue reso- lution. “If we had to make a change or in-
O
vestigate an issue, our linemen, techni- cians, or engineers would have to drive to the substation,” says David Smith, com- munications engineer at Carroll.” If it was an outage, customer calls would be coming in as we were trying to determine if there was an issue at the substation.” With a network of 41 substations
and over 10,000 miles of line serving over 100,000 accounts across 11 largely rural counties in Arkansas and Mis- souri, driving out to a substation from Car- roll Electric’s home office could take as long as an hour and a half. The lack of remote monitoring and management ability was get- ting in the way of the cooperative’s mission to provide the most reliable and affordable serv- ice to its members. “We knew a SCADA system would ad- dress our remote management needs,” says
Carroll Electric substation.
system from Pennsylvania-based NovaTech Automation, a substation automation compa- ny that has served the power transmission and distribution market for more than 40 years.
Remote Monitoring The company’s Orion Substation Au-
tomation Platform is a communication and automation processor that can connect to
THERMAL FATIGUE RESISTANCE
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ne of the largest electric cooperatives nationally, Berryville Arkansas-based Carroll Electric Cooperative Corpora-
Smith. “What we wanted was a centralized way to monitor the megawatts per substation and the amperage per feeder to ensure the loading levels were not exceeding our thresh- olds. This issue becomes even more of a risk during the colder winter months.” After undertaking a comprehensive search, Carroll Electric selected the OrionLX
nearly any substation device in its native pro- tocol, perform advanced math and logic, and securely present the source or calculated data to any number of clients in their own protocol. The Orion can be integrated with any equip- ment, including competitors, and is often con- nected to microprocessor-based relays, me- ters, event recorders, IEDs, and RTUs. It is then connected to an existing enterprise network or SCADA system. In this case, the system includes
OrionLX RTUs in each substation, which sends data back to a master unit located at Carroll Electric’s home office. “We had two primary criteria for
our SCADA selection, beyond the spe- cific functional requirements,” says Smith. “We needed a system that was easy for us to program on our own and was affordable. We did not want to be burdened with ongoing software, li- cense, or maintenance fees.” Ease of programming was impor- tant to Carroll Electric’s engineering
team for both the initial HMI set-up and for adding new installations in the future. The co- operative began with a single substation pilot for which NovaTech delivered the initial HMI. The Orion system uses open-source web
technologies and preconfigured template pages to simplify the building of interactive SCADA and local HMI screens to view data
Continued on next page
October, 2022
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