Applitech’s Power-IT solution provides a far-reaching, state of the art, efficient and reliable Power Management System (PMS) that not only caters to the industry’s needs but also deliver a product that excels industry requirements. Our Power Management System fully interacts with the existing power grid system to strengthen the outage management and load shedding activities. It serves as a backbone to business planning and performance, and decision-making processes.

Power-IT will be a direct aid in improving the control of electricity supply. 

Applitech’s Power-IT provides the tools that meet the following objectives (advantages):

• Provide on line monitoring and control of distribution feeders
• Reduce system outages
• Enhance fault detection, fault isolation and supply restoration
• Facilitate forward and reverse synchronization after power outages
• Increase the management efficiency of normal operation mode of the system
• Minimize lost revenue due to losses
• Improve productivity through minimal electricity disruptions
• Improve the quality of service
• Modernize customer service
• Enhance the decision making support

Power-IT performs the classical tasks of Distribution Network Monitoring and Control, and will be able to execute operational functions on Feeder Automation, System Restoration, Loss Minimization, Optimal Feeder Recognition, amongst others. This will provide superior quality of operational efficiency and reliability of the power services with international standards by implementing modern technology and techniques in the marketplace.

Major System Components:

• Self contained RTU units for control and monitoring of various power buses, relay breakers and power generation units
• Redundant PLCs for data concentration from various RTUs
• Redundant SCADA servers
• The Man Machine Interface
• Redundant Distribution Management Servers
• Distribution Management Modules

Circuit Breaker and Relay
Smart relays will be connected to the SCADA system via a RS-485 connection. The system is capable of extracting the following information thru the RS-485 port of these intelligent relays:

• CB Open/Close Command
• CB ON/OFF Feedback
• CB spring charge status
• Trip circuit healthy status
• Fault Trip status
• Breaker in service/test

Additional parameters to be polled from the relays:

• Phase 1 current
• Phase 2 current
• Phase 3 current
• Phase 1 voltage
• Phase 2 voltage
• Phase 3 voltage
• Active Power
• Reactive Power
• Energy
• Power Factor
• Frequency

Power Generation Turbines

The following parameters will be polled from each GT sets for monitoring:

• Phase 1 current
• Phase 2 current
• Phase 3 current
• Phase 1 voltage
• Phase 2 voltage
• Phase 3 voltage
• Active Power
• Reactive Power
• Energy
• Power Factor
• Frequency

If the existing GT PLC’s are capable of RS-485 communications the alarms and critical setpoint and process values from all GT sets will be transferred to the SCADA system.

Load Shedding
The load shedding functionality will be achieved using a frequency based control scheme. The frequency at each of the power meters on the bus will be monitored. The breakers associated with each of these buses will be shed in accordance with the frequency of that particular bus. A tiered approach of load shedding will be adopted. If the frequency of a particular bus falls below the acceptable frequency for that bus all non-critical loads on that bus will be shed to conserve energy. The loads to be shed will be user configurable thru a password protected SCADA admin screen. Once a load is shed, it will have to brought online manually by the plant operator after safe conditions prevail.

Grid Islanding
The grid islanding is done at the sub station via a protection relay. A control scheme is programmed in the protection relay to detect the change in frequency or detection of fault. Once any of the above mentioned conditions occur, the protection relay opens thus isolating the fault from the facility. The load shedding scheme also takes into account the status of this protection relay in order to shed loads in addition to the frequency based approach. The generation setpoint for the generators can also be varied based on this input (if desired).

Generator Modulation As mentioned, if the setpoints for the generators can be varied via the RS-485 interface, the generation setpoints can be modulated to make sure that there is always a positive potential between the plant demand and supply by the generator. This will ensure that there is always a minimal power draw from the grid preventing reverse power flow to the grid.

Balance of Plant (BOP)
Energy meters will be installed at various critical points in the plant to measure the total energy flowing to particular logical sections of the plant. The balance of plant will be performed based on the total energy inputted into the plant as measured at various incomer points (generation sources and external power sources) versus the total energy output to various sections of the plant. This will give an accurate idea of distribution losses within the plant area. This will also help owners calculate the energy costs for particular plant sections.

The Man Machine Interface
Interaction between users and the SCADA monitored power system will be mainly carried out by full graphic consoles, based on workstations, each one equipped with VDUs, one alphanumeric keyboard with numeric keypad and one cursor control device. Display will be used to accomplish the main following tasks:

• A GUI that is consistent, clear and immediately intuitive to electricity SCADA Operators
• View, monitor and control the power distribution system and equipment
• Display of real-time values being read from the field devices in a variety of user-configurable formats
• Display system messages that will provide information about completed tasks and errors
• Allow for alarm notification and acknowledgement

The other MMI equipment, such as printers, digital displays and projection screen can be used to enhance the user’s interaction with the power system.