Electricity and Control September 2023

TRANSFORMERS, SUBSTATIONS + CABLES

SCADA system helps manage municipal electricity distribution Drakenstein Municipality is working with global energy management leader, Schneider Electric and system integrator Altek, to upgrade its 25-year-old SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system to ETAP, a model-driven electrical SCADA software solution.

Dwibin Thomas, Cluster Automation Leader at Schneider Electric.

T he Drakenstein Municipality is located in the Cape Winelands District in the Western Cape. It awarded the upgrade project to Schneider Electric and implementation partner, Altek, following a rigorous tender process. The ETAP SCADA solution meets the requirements of the municipality, which is aiming to improve fault finding, predictive and preventive maintenance on equipment, and overall customer service delivery significantly. The system also needed to integrate with the Drakenstein Municipality’s existing infrastructure and the GIS (geographic information system) mapping solution. System-ready Before starting on the implementation of the ETAP SCADA solution, Drakenstein Municipality completed an eight-year communication network upgrade, which now sees all its substations communicating through a wireless ethernet or a fibre backbone. The previous SCADA system allowed only for radio frequency (RF) communication.

“We couldn’t embark on a SCADA upgrade before implementing a new communication backbone,” says Herman Rossouw, Senior Engineering Technician at Drakenstein Municipality. “Now, with our communication network fully operational, we have started deploying the new SCADA system. As a municipality, we will be well ahead of our peers – and as ETAP’s software continues to evolve it will readily meet our ongoing system needs.” Feature-rich Dwibin Thomas, Cluster Automation Leader at Schneider Electric, notes, “The ETAP SCADA offering is software neutral, which allows it to overcome integration and interoperability issues, thus saving on costly equipment upgrades and project delays. “The system offers a range of features, such as live insight into switching operations, which provides us with valuable information on current loads and what you can and cannot move or implement on the system in order to safeguard equipment,” says Leon Laing, Manager: Planning and Customer Services (Electro-Technical Services Department) at Drakenstein Municipality. “Also, as it integrates with the GIS, the ETAP system will be able to pinpoint accurately which customers are being affected by power failure and that will allow us to cut down on fault finding and turnaround times significantly. The ETAP solution will also make use of Drakenstein Municipality’s communication backbone to provide remote access to operators, again improving on system monitoring. Moreover, it will provide preventive maintenance schedules, which will mitigate potential equipment failure and costly repairs.” Rossouw also highlights the ETAP system’s digital twin technology: “This will enable us to simulate maintenance processes. The solution uses historical and current data to simulate maintenance and upgrades to the system. This means that when we perform maintenance, we can prevent unnecessary and unplanned system tripping.” The Drakenstein Municipality ETAP SCADA project is scheduled for completion by 2025. “When the project is complete, we hope to benefit from a sophisticated SCADA system that will deliver a sound return on investment, as well as enabling us to react more quickly to outages and failures, reducing fault finding times and improving the customers’ experience,” says Laing. □

ETAP is an energy management software platform to design, operate, and automate power systems.

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22 Electricity + Control SEPTEMBER 2023