Major US utility resolving the “trouble” with RTUs
USA: A major Midwest utility hires NovaTech Automation on a multi-year replacement of all their remote terminal units.
Image source: NovaTech Automation
USA: A major Midwest utility hires NovaTech Automation on a multi-year replacement of all their remote terminal units.
At utility substations, remote terminal units (RTUs) are critical components used for monitoring circuit breaker positions, alarms, voltages / currents, temperatures, and additional data from a variety of wired sensors. They can also control breakers, tap changers, and capacitor banks. However, for many utilities, RTUs remain a trouble spot. As RTUs age, reliability issues, unforgiving software, lack of vendor support for older product lines, increased training time, and diminishing availability of replacement parts can make RTUs an ongoing and time-consuming task for substation technicians.
Despite utilizing RTUs from several known providers, the reliability issues became so frequent that the engineering team decided the best course of action was to start upgrading all the RTUs across their entire network.
“Some of our RTUs started having software and hardware failures,” says the utility’s senior supervisor. “They were not very old, maybe ten years. We had one unit where the screen froze up, and the software and the configuration were corrupted. The RTU vendor told us the only thing we could do was to rebuild the database, which we did completely.”
The utility personnel began discussions with Pennsylvania-based, NovaTech Automation, a leading substation automation provider. The company offered its OrionLX automation platform as an RTU replacement.
After testing to fully validate the new RTUs, the utility chose to replace their existing units with the NovaTech Orion line.
As part of the project, NovaTech worked with the utility to custom build and configure an OrionLX unit to function identically to one of the brands of RTUs they were replacing.
The training time required for technicians to program and install new units was minimal, as the new RTUs are “technician-friendly,” with a greater ease of maintenance.
“I am glad I did not resist change when we were considering replacing the RTU units that were causing us trouble,” says the senior supervisor. “With our confidence in the reliability of our new RTUs, and standardizing on solutions from a single provider, our engineering team is able to focus on improving our network infrastructure in other ways without being constantly drawn back to performance issues.”
Source: NovaTech Automation
#equipment replacement#NovaTech Automation#remote terminal units#USA