USA, Arkansas, Berryville: electric cooperative Carroll Electric Cooperative Corporation has recently faced a challenge in the managing network of substations.
Without an ability to remotely monitor substation performance or receive notifications from remote equipment, personnel of the one of the largest US electric cooperatives had to travel to substations for various issues, which delayed response times and issue resolution.
With a network of 41 substations and over 16,000 km (10,000 mi) of line serving over 100,000 accounts across 11 largely rural counties in Arkansas and Missouri, driving out to a substation from Carroll Electric’s home office could take as long as an hour and a half. The lack of remote monitoring and management ability was getting in the way of the cooperative’s mission to provide the most reliable and affordable service to its members.
“We knew a SCADA system would address our remote management needs,” David Smith, Engineer – Communications at Carroll. “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 thresholds. This issue becomes even more of a risk during the colder winter months.”
After undertaking a comprehensive search, Carroll Electric selected the OrionLX system from Pennsylvania-based NovaTech Automation, a substation automation company that has served the power transmission and distribution market for more than 40 years.
Now the monitoring is done from the office. The engineering team remotely logs into the substation devices to view settings, sequence of events and make changes if needed.
The remote monitoring capabilities that the SCADA implementation has brought to Carroll’s engineering team have enabled them to manage the scope of their geographically dispersed network and support the cooperative’s mission for reliable and cost-effective service more efficiently.
This text is taken from https://transformers-magazine.com/tm-news/scada-system-as-solution-to-remote-substation-management/
