News

The National Electricity Regulator of South Africa (NERSA) recently visited the Electro-technical directorate for a routine audit and commended the officials for their inhouse development of the SCADA(Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) software  system noting in the report that “The Licensee is commended for the in-house projects of installing a SCADA system. The Municipality can indeed be very proud of staff (in this case the Engineering Sub-Directorate) and accomplishments like this”. NERSA’s final audit report will be submitted to George Council when received. 

The SCADA system is used to monitor and control the high voltage sub-transmission electrical network and the medium voltage distribution network.  Although most municipalities outsource SCADA services due to its complexity, George Electrotechnical Services decided to develop its own SCADA system, using Adroit software. 

In 2006, 2 technical magazines published an article about the SCADA system that the directorate implemented.  At that stage, George Municipality was one of the first electrical utilities to implement substation integration.   Substation integration involves integrating electrical protection, control, and data acquisition functions into a minimal number of platforms to reduce capital and operating costs, reduce panel and control room space, and eliminate redundant equipment, wiring and databases.

According to Kobus Wilken, Deputy Director: Engineering Services, the department has since improved on data retrieval methods, which allows for faster fault analysis and restoration of power.  Just more than 11 000 digital and 900 analogue values are read in by the SCADA system every 2 seconds. “This increases every year when we add substation and equipment to be monitored and controlled.”

“In the event of a network fault, the SCADA system collects the fault data from the affected protection devices and displays the information on a screen.  Messages are then also automatically sent to staff to notify them of the trip or abnormal network condition.  The Chief network controller can then quickly analyse the data and act accordingly to minimise outage times.”

“We strive to keep up with the change in technology and to better the SCADA system day by day, all in the name of better service delivery!”