Since there is no internet access at remote sites, 4G and DSL modems were considered as two possible methods to establish communication between the PecStar iEMS platform and the PQ monitors installed at remote substations. However, due to noise conditions during long-distance transmission over twisted pair cables, it took approximately 2 minutes to receive complex information (such as waveform recordings) from the PQ monitors. From a system perspective, this performance was completely unacceptable, as utilities require timely notifications for PQ (Power Quality) events. CET was able to overcome this issue by implementing an effective error-handling scheme and an enhanced device driver, reducing the communication time from 2 minutes to just 5 seconds.

PQ Platform:

PecStar@iEMS is a unified application for power quality monitoring and energy management that integrates data acquisition, database management, and web services, offering comprehensive data analysis and customizable reporting tools. While PecStar iEMS met all of the client’s software requirements, there was still a system performance issue involving the collection of event data from 500 PQ monitors within 60 seconds.

Given that a large volume of data is transmitted following a PQ event, prioritization of waveform data, event data, real-time data, and log data was necessary. Simple optimizations were made in the device driver to assign a higher priority to event data, allowing the PecStar iEMS software to consolidate event data and send emergency notifications within the 60-second target time. As a result, PecStar iEMS was able to gather all event data from the 500 PQ monitors in just 15 seconds, surpassing the client's performance expectations.

The trial system was successfully tested and approved by the utility, marking it as a qualified system. This trial also demonstrated that CET's PecStar iEMS is an open system platform capable of handling different third-party PQ monitors and efficiently managing large volumes of PQ data from extensive PQ systems.