How much money is downtime costing your utility?

By Brian Quinn, Evans Utility Group

Brian Quinn, Director of Utility Operations and Maintenance, Evans Utility Group

Have you assessed how much each hour of downtime costs your utility company? According to Cambashi's Christine Easterfield, a consultant and IT expert serving the utility sector, "communications protocols are also crucial to the continuing secure and safe supply of utilities--especially energy."  The days of managing your utility's equipment manually should be gone. Downtime should be minimized to next to nothing.   Today's operation of most industrial, facilities, natural resources, and utilities depend upon equipment and processes that are managed remotely but in real time.  And protocols play a big role the management of remote monitoring within a utility. 

In devising a remote monitoring IT infrastructure, it is important not to overlook any of its infrastructure components because they are all critical to the success of any utility's SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system working efficiently.  For starters, management of distributed components through RTUs (Remote transmission Units) requires real time connectivity through a reliable, low latency network, at increasingly high data throughput levels.  Fortunately, the industry is steadily moving to IP-based communications standards that offer the speed, security and reliability required for these mission critical applications. The operational components and networks of a utility/municipal scale wireless infrastructure need to be assessed and implemented prior to integrating a SCADA.

Utility companies use Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks to remotely monitor and control tank levels, flows, pressures, voltages, currents and alarms.  Networks that were once efficient and state-of-the-art are rapidly becoming expensive to maintain.  Among the most prevalent problems was the lack of disaster recovery and remote management applications that are now available today.  Additionally utility companies are looking to technology as a solution to lower operation and management costs and overcoming security challenges.  Unfortunately, with the proliferation of technologies and options to choose from, getting the most out of your network and utility infrastructure isn't always simple and affordable.  

The interoperability trend today among technology providers of SCADA, PLCs, communication software and networking devices is in the collaboration among vendors and the forming of partnerships.  For instance, PcVue, a subsidiary of ARC Informatique and provider of HMI SCADA software for energy and utility market among others, has partnered with Moxa, whose products are used throughout the power generation, transmission, and distribution stages. The partnership is designed  to help monitor substations and service cabinets, establish high speed redundant network backbones, and provide wireless automatic meter reading and Kepware Technologies, whose OPC & communication drivers and plug-in options drivers are used to connect SCADA with PLCs and other devices.  This is a prime example of how vendors of complimentary products and services must work together to serve this industry and address interoperability issues and standards.

We have also seen that information technology is becoming more integral to the utilities sector and service quality is becoming increasingly more important to organizations.  While automation systems are universally employed for operational management and communications at all levels of a utility infrastructure, it is important to note that there still needs to be a level of system sophistication in process monitoring and control to quickly identify problems and remotely manage and control equipment.  And typically connectivity is always at the heart of building out any utility infrastructure.  This is because it enables the two-way communication and monitoring between producers and end-users. It is also the communication backbone between utilities and consumers through advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), or smart meters and sensors, to determine where and to what extent electricity is being consumed.  AMI can deliver both customers and utilities with real-time or near real-time energy information, including pricing, demand, power, quality, and so on.

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)/Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) applications typically require connectivity across a utility's service area.  Such networks can create a multi-use wireless WAN, part of which can be specifically reserved for mission critical SCADA applications. In a typical deployment, the SCADA applications operate on a totally independent sub-net throughout the wired and wireless infrastructure, with security policies and Quality of Service (QoS) parameters that represent the critical nature of the applications.

About the Author
Brian Quinn is the Director of Utility Operations and Maintenance at Evans Utility Group.  He has 18 years of experience in the operation of collection and distribution systems, in both operational and supervisory positions.