Medium Voltage Grid Automation RTUs

Key Features

• Project start: April 2012
• Project com­ple­tion: Decem­ber 2012
• iGrid prod­ucts involved: iRTU-B0D1
• Num­ber of data points: Up to 450 I/O points/substation
• Pro­to­cols: IEC60870‑5–104

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.

Dur­ing the first phase of the project, RTUs of three dif­fer­ent ven­dors were deployed, includ­ing iRTU-B0D1 units which were inte­grat­ed in com­pact MV sub­sta­tions sup­plied by Ormaz­a­bal. The iRTU-B0D1 unit was con­nect­ed to Ormaz­a­bal bay con­troller relay through a RS485 bus using the PROCOME pro­to­col, thus allow­ing to con­trol up to 8 MV feed­er controllers.

Exter­nal GPRS modems were used to com­mu­ni­cate with the con­trol cen­ter using the IEC60870‑5–104 protocol.