Dakota Electric Association (DEA), founded in 1937 by a group of farmers, is a member-owned, non-profit electric utility.
Dakota Electric Association
Designed for Success - The Power of SCADA
iPower takes a unique approach to the problem faced by rural coops of finding good-quality yet affordable SCADA.
Dakota Electric Association (DEA), founded in 1937 by a group of farmers, is a member-owned, non-profit electric utility serving parts of Dakota, Goodhue, Scott, and Rice counties, just south of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Covering 507 miles and serving more than 95,000 members, Dakota Electric is the second-largest electric cooperative in Minnesota and is ranked among the 20 largest electric distribution cooperatives nationally.
The company is committed to providing reliable, affordable, electric energy and a high level of personal service to members and the communities in which they live. Because Dakota County cities are growing rapidly, Dakota Electric Association acquires approximately 2,200 new members each year.
To serve its ever-growing population, DEA had to upgrade its obsolete SCADA master station, the most critical real-time system in the business, which serves as the central monitoring and control system used by the electric company to operate its electricity network. As SCADA systems age they can become unreliable, and are difficult to interface to the other computer systems in the business, making it hard for the company to integrate business processes and access critical data.
Dakota Electric turned to New Zealand-based Catapult Software, which has been developing SCADA software products and installing SCADA systems for the electricity industry since 1991. The company develops iPower, a product specifically for electric utility SCADA operations based on GE Fanuc's Proficy™ HMI/SCADA iFIX, a robust HMI/SCADA solution that provides process visualization, data acquisition and supervisory control of operations.
iPower delivers a modern, sophisticated and "evergreen" SCADA software to electric utilities that includes all of the safety, performance, reliability and management needs to efficiently operate an electric network.
Delivering The Best of Both Worlds
When one of Catapult Software's electric distribution customers asked them to look at the available SCADA systems, they found existing systems fell into two camps: those that were developed specifically for the electric industry and control systems developed for larger factory automation markets. The first seemed overly expensive, yet typically lagged behind current industry standards and trends. The second were sold in high volumes, deliver considerably more sophistication and are much better priced. Their shortcoming was a lack of specific functionality required for electric distribution SCADA.
"iPower was developed to deliver the best of both worlds," said Tony Haresnape, President of Catapult Software. "We started with a market- leading, sophisticated control system in Proficy HMI/SCADA iFIX from GE Fanuc. We added the software services needed to meet the requirements of electric distribution SCADA. The result is a sophisticated Windows®-based SCADA system, affordable and perfect for the needs of rural electric cooperatives."
"The needs of electric distribution cooperatives were not met by SCADA suppliers," said Randy Poulson, VP Engineering Services for Dakota Electric. "iPower SCADA software offers full-featured, safe, reliable and affordable SCADA suitable for distribution cooperatives of any size."
The iPower application is at the very center of the safe and reliable delivery of electricity to DEA's customer base. Dakota Electric is a distribution cooperative. Distribution cooperatives provide electric service directly to residential and commercial/industrial members.
Each electricity substation has a RTU (Remote Terminal Unit), an I/O device similar to a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). The RTU is wired to analog and digital transducers, relaying their current value/state back to the iPower SCADA computers in the power company's control room. The control room is usually in the power company's headquarters, while the substations are spread across the power network. Communication to the RTUs from the control room is often accomplished by radio.
Human operators monitor the state of the electricity network at the iPower workstations by monitoring the system through the information from the RTUs: analog data includes voltages and currents at key locations and digital data includes the state of the circuit breakers. Alarm and event processing are other important monitoring tools. In addition, operators perform controls such as remote opening and closing of circuit breakers.
"Catapult iPower SCADA software offers full-featured, safe, reliable and affordable SCADA suitable for distribution cooperatives of any size. "
Randy Poulson, VP Engineering Services - Dakota Electric Association
The system assists with a clear, concise display of information – a single picture that overviews the whole power network. The operators use this picture to drill down to individual substation pictures to see detail supported by alarms and events lists. The application, which handles approximately 20,000 tags, is designed to present critical information in a clear and intuitive way so that operators are not swamped with flashing lights and alarms during a storm that causes outages.
It is important to DEA that they reduce outage time. Critical measures for the success of the utility are the average time to repair any outage, and the number of outages they incur in a year. The SCADA system is a critical tool to help them quickly understand the state of the network and effect repairs.
The system also assists in safe operation. Imagine if a circuit breaker is accidentally operated while linesmen were repairing a power line.
"The software is so easy to install and configure, it is possible for co-op staff to do much of that work with very minimal training. With iPower, the days of having someone else build your new SCADA system at the factory and you attending never ending factory testing and training sessions are over."
Len Jewell, Technical Systems Manager - Dakota Electric Association
Getting Graphic
From a reporting perspective, the company needed two different aspects addressed by iPower. First, after a major event, like a storm that caused an outage, they wanted to review the sequence of events to learn the root cause of the outage and also to understand how the network behaved. iPower adds a detailed events record to Proficy HMI/SCADA iFIX to make this possible. The information is time stamped down to 1 ms by the RTU. It also gives the company a precise and long term record of everything every operator has done.
In addition, Dakota Electric needed historical information about how the demand for electricity has varied over the past day, week and month. They use GE Fanuc's Proficy Historian for this purpose. This information is critical to DEA to understand how to reliably and cost effectively deliver power to meet the needs of their customers.
iFIX features Graphic Dynamos that are reusable, animated objects or groups of objects that enable the creation of graphic elements quickly and easily. Graphic Dynamo sets provide a number of predefined objects such as circuit breakers and transformers, which can be dropped into the WorkSpace to save development time.
Catapult Software took the Graphic Dynamo concept in iFIX the next step in iPower with complex objects that represent the real world. For example, a Transformer Dynamo becomes more than the transformer graphic, it also automatically links to the 20 to 30 analog and digital tags in the iFIX database that relate to the realworld transformer. This means that to configure a transformer on a picture is one drag and drop, not 20 or 30.
"The software is so easy to install and configure it is possible for cooperative staff to do much of that work with very minimal training," said Len Jewell, Technical Systems Manager for Dakota Electric. "With iPower, the days of having someone else build your new SCADA system a the factory and you attending never-ending factory testing and training sessions are over."
The company is now in the later stages of deploying their new iPower SCADA system based on Proficy HMI/SCADA iFIX. They chose the system after reviewing the existing options on the market, and after extensive bench-testing by DEA engineers.
Achieving Goals
The results for DEA are clear. From a customer perspective, implementation of iPower for iFIX delivers more reliable service and therefore fewer outages, and when there is an outage, it is shorter in duration.
From an internal business perspective, Dakota Electric has more ability to integrate SCADA data with other business data so that they are able to find and make efficiency gains, and accurately tune their business. And, with good history and reports that detail the behavior of their network, they are able to improve the efficiency of the network and ultimately lower the cost of electricity for its members.
"SCADA systems don't need to be complicated and difficult. It doesn't have to be hard to share information between SCADA and office systems; upgrading the software can be as easy as upgrading Microsoft Office software. You can find a lot of good features in an affordable SCADA system and the people putting it all together can have a lot of fun doing it."
Brian Kinstad, Technical Systems Developer - Dakota Electric Association
