Transelec strengthens its electrical system with PcVue SCADA
Transelec, one of Chile’s leading suppliers of high-voltage systems, says it has strengthened its electrical system and improved the robustness of its operations.
PcVue SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) platform has been selected to control Alto Jahuel substation, the largest one of Chile National Electric System.
With almost 10,000 kilometers of lines and more than 60 substations, from the Arica y Parinacota Region to the Los Lagos Region, Transelec is the main supplier of high voltage systems in Chile.
More than 70 years of experience in the energy sector support its vast expertise, allowing them to provide jobs to more than 500 workers.
They also represent a fundamental piece in the country’s progress, since they are the main electric power transmission company in Chile and transport the energy that reaches 98 percent of the population living from the north to most of the south, with an 84.5 percent share of the National Electric System.
Transelec’s work is a continuous reinforcement of the electrical system in order to make it increasingly robust and thus enable the connection of renewable energies, while advancing towards the decarbonization of the energy matrix.
Transelec is owned by a consortium made up of the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, British Columbia Investment Management, Public Sector Pension Investment Board, and China Southern Power Grid International.
Transelec’s main task is to provide an uninterrupted electrical system in which energy is transported through high voltage transmission lines from generation sources to cities and industrial and mining users.
Substations convert the energy to low voltage for distribution to end users, contributing to the improvement of their quality of life and by extension to the country’s development.
Among its various substations, the Alto Jahuel substation stands out, located in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, it is the substation with the largest capacity in the National Electric System, with an installed capacity of 2,554 MVA.
It also has yards with all the voltage levels that exist in the Chilean transmission system: 500kV, 220kV, 154kV, 110kV, 60kV and 13.2kV.
Being specialists in the development and implementation of SCADA systems, SCADATECH was chosen by Transelec for this project.
As part of its comprehensive engineering solutions for electrical power systems, the company selected the versatile platform of PcVue Solutions for the automation of the Alto Jahuel substation, allowing the monitoring and control of its seven yards.
Initially, the customer did not have local HMIs to monitor the yards from the control rooms associated with each of them, so the operations had to be performed directly on the control equipment.
Due to this, SCADATECH proposed PcVue’s SCADA solution to provide a scalable and multifunctional platform that would allow the integration of future requirements and reduce the risk for operators when executing maneuvers by transferring operations to the control rooms of each power yard.
Technically, the application allows direct integration in MMS protocol standard 61850, in addition to the DNP 3.0 protocol, which was chosen as the basis for the project, as well as the use of existing adaptable programming within the PcVue platform.
It provides the flexibility to display the dynamic coloration of the voltage levels in the substation’s single-line diagrams according to the standard used by Transelec, in which different types of alarms are indicated according to the aforementioned coloration.
Likewise, the HMI stations allow the visualization in real time of status and measurements of the electrical system. It also carries out the remote control or operation towards the IED field equipment, having total control and supervision of the existing electrical system.
For the control and supervision of the different displays: general unilinear, alarms and events panel, communications diagram and other areas, a menu was configured on the right side of the screen that facilitates navigation between the different areas, allowing the operator to execute his tasks locally.