Control systems methods to monitor & control remote DE sites
Len-IDEA
Our district energy system consists of 13 miles of steam pipe. Steam is supplied by a single cogeneration plant. The plant’s distributed control system monitors pressures at the ends of the system and moves valves at various control stations to maintain pressure. Communication with the remote sites is by leased telephone lines. The telephone company has informed us that they will soon discontinue support for these lines . What communication methods are other district energy systems using to control and monitor their systems? Can you recommend a vendor?
Karen Hinkforth
Senior Engineer – Power Generation
We Energies
office: 414-221-4133
karen.h...@we-energies.com
Edward T. Borer Jr.
We pull remote pressures, temperatures, and flows from a central Building Energy Management system and transfer key information via analog I/O to our energy plant SCADA system. This avoids IT security risk to the plant. We do this for data gathering only. We do not use this strategy for _control_ of remote devices. Most (all?) of our steam pressure let-down stations are manually, locally adjusted.
Ted Borer, PE, CEM, LEED AP
Princeton University
Energy Plant Manager
MacMillan Building, Elm Drive
Princeton, NJ 08543-2158
Cell: (609) 731-2327
Home: (609) 466-3322
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Hugh Bahar
The phone company should give a reasonable and customary amount of time for the plant to design and implement a solution. Ask them for a quote to provide support for the lines until the plant can design and implement a new communication path. Cutting off control-critical phone service necessary to an operating plant invites a court injunction.
Consider taking over the lines from the phone company if there is telecom copper between the control valves and plant. If there isn’t a copper path that is entirely onsite, work with the phone company to determine if the onsite circuits can be bridged so most of the copper infrastructure can be maintained.
If copper can’t be maintained long-term, hire a company to establish a secure VPN via Ethernet between the valves and the plant. Depending on how many control valves there are this could take a while. If possible, run conduit from the control valves to the nearest local building, hopefully to an Ethernet connection in a mechanical room. Control integrity, reliability, security and local/node room UPS & emergency power should all be paramount whether you continue with copper or move to Ethernet. Every powered switch/actively powered component between the control valve and plant will need UPS/emergency power.
If I had to guess, rapid steam load changes swing this plant's boilers around. If this is correct, a different control paradigm could be investigated whereas it might be possible to eliminate the field-located control valves that are the concern.
If the IDEA member needs some communications savvy engineers, they may email me privately.
Regards,
Hugh
Hugh Bahar,
PMP
Somrah, Dowlatram
Dowlatram Somrah, BE, ME, P.E.
Con Edison
Steam Distribution Engineering
Phone: 212-460-3920
Fax: 212-673-5458
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