Scada transition enhances Drakenstein’s power delivery

Drakenstein Municipality is currently partnering with Schneider Electric and system integrator partner Altek to upgrade its 25-year-old supervisory control and data acquisition (Scada) system to ETAP – a model-driven electrical software solution. This development is aimed at significantly improving fault finding, predictive and preventative equipment maintenance and overall customer service delivery. Moreover, the system integrates with Drakenstein Municipality’s existing infrastructure and its GIS mapping solution.

In preparation for the upgrade, Drakenstein Municipality completed an eight-year communication network revamp, which now sees all its substations communicating through a wireless ethernet or a fibre backbone. The previous Scada system only allowed for radiofrequency communication.

Feature-rich

“The ETAP Scada system offers so many exciting features such as live insight into switching operations that 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, Drakenstein Municipality.

“Also, as it integrates with GIS, the ETAP system will be able to accurately pinpoint which customers are being affected by power failures. That will allow us to drastically cut down on fault finding and turnaround times,” he continues.

The ETAP solution will also utilise Drakenstein Municipality’s communication backbone to provide remote access to operators, again improving on system monitoring. Moreover, it will provide preventative maintenance schedules, which will mitigate potential equipment failure and costly repairs. An added benefit is that, with the ETAP systems’ digital twin technology, the municipality will also be able to simulate maintenance processes.

The Drakenstein Municipality ETAP Scada project is earmarked for completion by 2025. “When the project is complete, we hope to benefit from a sophisticated Scada system that will not only deliver return on investment, but also enable us to react quicker to outages and failures, reducing fault finding, and ultimately enhance customer experience,” Laing concludes.