EnergyBiz - January/February 2008 - (Page 70) » Tech FronTier Wireless Monitoring Advances netWOrk enaBles reMOte ManageMent By salvatOre salaMOne t y pica LLy, UtiLities Use a mix oF commUni- cations technologies to send real-time information about the status of equipment such as transformers in substations and other devices throughout a transmission and distribution system back to a central command center. Utilities commonly use a combination of a normal phone line, a cell phone, and industrial radio technology. Unfortunately, many of these communications methods often fail. Utilities NewsFlash must constantly monitor and JapaN Goes manage more and more to HuNGaRy devices all the time. Adding Japan plans to buy a new communications link carbon credits from for each device can become Hungary, the Associated expensive. Additionally, using Press reported. some devices, such as cell Japan is making the deal to comply phones, isn’t practical in some with its obligations to rural areas where wireless reduce greenhouse gas carriers might not have the emissions under the necessary coverage to reach Kyoto Protocol. Hungary new substations. has about 10 million tons of carbon credits to sell. About two years ago, Great According to Japanese River Energy started to look at newspaper reports, alternatives to overcome such Japan is planning common utility industry probto spend about $180 million for that lems with communications. amount of credits. One of the nation’s largest generation and transmission cooperatives, Great River Energy provides wholesale electric service to 28 distribution cooperatives. The company boasts 2,500 megawatt generation capabilities, more than 4,500 miles of transmission lines, 102 transmission substations, and 498 distribution substations, and it serves 627,000 commercial and residential customers. To better support its operations and its cooperative members, GRE chose a two-way, real-time communications system that could handle the variety of data and traffic required to manage and monitor its systems. In talking to equipment vendors, the company discovered a wireless communications technology that used the 700 megahertz spectrum to carry data. Using standard wireless communication components operating at this frequency, GRE could transmit the data between substations and radio towers and carry this traffic on a backbone network back to a command or operations center. To use the 700 megahertz frequency band requires a license from the Federal Communications Commission. A company can apply for its own license. But this can be time consuming, complicated, and costly. “We were not comfortable with the risks of managing the equipment and managing the FCC,” said Jim Jones, vice president and CIO at Great River Energy. Additionally, for GRE to obtain the geographical coverage it needed would require a national license, which would be prohibitively A radio node supports two-way wireless expensive. communications with substation equipment. An alternative would Photo CourtEsy of ArCAdiAn nEtWorks be to work with a radio system operator with an FCC license for the spectrum and obtain spectrum access through that entity. Several companies with local area licensees offered access, but for national coverage, GRE would have had to work with five local license holders. This led the company to search for an operator with a national license. “It is easier to deal with one company, rather than five,” said Jones. Great River Energy selected Arcadian Networks and the two have been working together for about two years in the planning and deployment of a network to connect substations, meters, and transformers. The two companies kicked off a two-year deployment project in April 2006. The network relies on radio towers placed throughout the region. Substations and devices in the field transmit data to these towers, which connect to a backbone network that then carries the traffic to a central command center. Additionally, commands can be sent to the equipment over the same network. To ensure security, the traffic is encrypted. Basically, Arcadian Networks offers a private digital network that allows electric utilities to collect and monitor data from distant locations in real-time. Arcadian believes its network will enable new smart grid applications such as two-way communications to support distributed generation and remote equipment monitoring. Other applications that can be and are supported include supervisory control and data acquisition, security monitoring and surveillance, voice over Internet protocol, transmission operations, automatic meter reading and workforce management. System designers had to resolve how to handle special data before making the move to this new network. Specifically, throughout Great River’s system many pieces of equipment used proprietary point-to-point communications technologies. This data could not simply be sent over the network. It had to be encapsulated – the equivalent of inserting a letter into an envelope – to send it over the network. By mid-December 2007, about 60 Arcadian base stations were online with another half dozen or so to be added in the next six months. 70 E n E rgyB i z January/February 2008 http://www.energycentral.com
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