Medium Voltage Grid Distribution Control Center

Key Features

• Project start: June 2011
• Project com­ple­tion: June 2012
• iGrid prod­ucts involved: iCon­trol SCADA – Con­trol Cen­ter Edition
• Num­ber of RTUs/MV sub­sta­tions: Up to 4.000 MV sub­sta­tions with 15 points/RTU
• Num­ber of data points: Up to 60.000 I/O points
• Pro­to­cols: IEC60870‑5–104, IEC60870‑5–101, DNP3.0

Project Description

Pri­or to the project start, the cus­tomer (a dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny in south­ern Buenos Aires, Argenti­na) had only been con­trol­ling its HV dis­tri­b­u­tion grid remote­ly. At the end of 2010, the cus­tomer decid­ed to extend its con­trol to the 25kV MV dis­tri­b­u­tion grid in order to improve the qual­i­ty of ser­vice in south­ern Buenos Aires, an area with more than 2,500,000 cus­tomers and more than 6,000,000 people.

The project began in June 2011 with the goal of fin­ish­ing the first phase of the project (con­trol cen­ter in full oper­a­tion) dur­ing the first half of 2012 and install anoth­er 150 RTUs at the end of 2012. Now, upon com­ple­tion, iCon­trol is con­trol­ling 4,000 RTUs from sev­er­al manufacturers.

The con­trol cen­ter is is man­aged by three oper­a­tors who con­trol dif­fer­ent geo­graph­i­cal areas, while a forth oper­a­tor is devot­ed to main­te­nance tasks. All of them have per­mis­sion to con­trol any RTU in the grid, thus allow­ing the oper­a­tors to observe and act on any inci­dent the moment it takes place.

The imple­ment­ed iCon­trol SCADA sys­tem is based on a client/server archi­tec­ture, in which all four oper­a­tors com­mu­ni­cate with one SCADA serv­er. The com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the RTUs and iCon­trol con­trol cen­ter is car­ried out via IEC60870‑5–104, IEC60870‑5–101 and DNP3.0, through the pub­lic GPRS net­work.