With an investment in software of 40 thousand dollars, plus the development of building infrastructure and connectivity, the CPE It has a modern operating center to monitor the conditions of the electrical service in real time.
The old SCADA (Supervision, Control and Data Acquisition) system, which had already been in operation for two decades in the cooperative, was replaced by a new software that required more than two years of adaptation.
The new SCADA controls the operation from the monitoring center of the entire electrical network of the CPE concession area, which extends over almost one million hectares and eight locations that include Santa Rosa, Toay, Ataliva Roca, Anguil, Uriburu, Lonquimay. , Catril and Mauricio Mayer, a vast rural area.
The update of the system began in the middle of the pandemic, the cooperative said, since the previous one was beginning to become obsolete due to the new technologies and the incorporation of modern transformer substations in the area.
All the information coming from the transformer substations reaches the control center via fiber optics and the data is processed in virtualized servers, in a redundant architecture to guarantee system operation in critical situations and facilitate hardware maintenance.
The migration and commissioning of the new technology was much more complicated than expected, said the engineer Paul Stellin, Assistant Manager of Operations, Security and Public Lighting. The new system was a kind of closed package, although very versatile, that had to be adapted and put into practice in each place of the network and substations that the cooperative operates, with their corresponding wiring diagrams. connection, fiber optic lines, LAN networks, sensors, actuators, remote terminal units, hardware, operating systems and screens. But we did it and we can say that today the difference between the SCADA acquired and the one developed by us here is abysmal, points out the engineer who heads a group of operators at the Control Center, where six trios — each made up of an operator, an officer and an assistant on duty— rotate to cover 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It should be noted that the purchase of the software alone demanded an investment of 40 thousand dollars.
What are the advantages of the new technology?
After six arduous months of work, the CPE team of engineers, technicians and operators managed to conceive and establish a fully functioning system, explained the cooperative itself.
With the new technology, a large part of the electrical network is operated from the control center, failures caused, for example, by birds, branches or other types of incidents, and the projection of the working day are detected prematurely.
Through a system of audible and visual alarms, the operator monitors the entire system in real time, which also combines and analyzes data with the cooperative’s weather station to assess the status of the electrical system in the event of extreme weather events.
Source: CPE Press
