Evo Energy Projects

Evo Energy (formerly ActewAGL) is the electricity distribution company for the Australian Capital Territory, supplying power to many important institutions including Parliament House, Department of Defence, ASIO, ANU and the Tax Office, as well as approximately 380,000 residents.

Location : Australian Capital Territory (ACT)

Projects by Dave Turner Engineering

Date: 2017 to 2018

Engineered a series of upgrades and enhancements to several 132kV/11kV Zone substations across the ACT.  Works included :-

• Complete reconfiguration of the Invensys SCD5200 RTUs in two Zone substations.  
  • Because re-commissioning of the data points would have been too disruptive and uneconomic, the RTU hardware and software were 100% point to point tested off site using a custom testbed written by Dave Turner Engineering to simulate the SCADA environment.   The testbed's core was written in C# for a PC, using the Open Source OpenDNP3 library.  A set of four Raspberry Pi computers were also used to provide actual IP endpoints using Proxy Servers to simulate two IEDs (mostly protection relays) and two Master Stations at any given time. 
  • The simulation was validated against a subset of spare protection relays in Evo Energy's test lab. 
  • After installation of the newly configured RTUs, the status of field inputs and analogue values were confirmed as being the same as with the old configuration.  Operation of controls to some spare equipment was confirmed.  The 100% off site testbed pre-testing of the configuration resulted in zero errors during the on-site tests. 
• The communications media between several substations and the control room was changed.
• Data points were added for some new 132kV incomers and some 11kV feeders in several substations.
• Local substation automation was added to some substations.
• Other additions for new IED functions.

Date: 2015

• Addressed a series of issues
• Wrote Work Instructions and a Excel-VBA utility to facilitate consistent maintenance of the RTUs by ActewAGL's staff
• Assisted in the commissioning of a Zone sub-station
• Presented a short training course about the RTUs and their maintenance

As Invensys's Principal Applications Engineer

Date : 2010 to 2015 

Led a team of engineers to successfully upgrade nine 132kV/11kV Zone substations in the Canberra area, and one new substation.  

Dave presented a 2 week training course on using the SCD5200 RTU to the team of ActewAGL engineers.  This enabled them to play important roles during the subsequent projects and later maintenance work.

The RTUs were employed using DNP 3.0 protocol over TCP/IP and serial radio links to the ENMAC Master Station as well as DNP3 over TCP/IP to the local ClearSCADA HMIs.  

In the first set of Zone Substations, physical I/O terminations were efficiently transferred from the old C225 RTUs to the new SCD5200s.  Implementation used replacement pre-wired I/O modules to minimise downtime, and rollback strategies were available.

The final two Zone Substations were of a more sophisticated design and were largely Dave’s solo work.  

Expert proactive inter-operability testing of the DNP3 interfaces of various IEDs during project integration revealed several IED and RTU faults, for which firmware changes were made or work-around identified.  Finding these problems at an early stage and tireless co-ordination with the firmware developers resulted in significant project savings, with FAT and subsequent testing proceeding smoothly.

Most of the I/O was from approximately 100 IEDs from SEL, MiCOM and ABB, all using DNP 3.0 over over TCP/IP.  The RTUs operate as a fully redundant pair offering no-break failover and failback.  Failure of either RTU has negligible effect on data availability.  Dave proposed, designed, implemented and commissioned this revolutionary scheme, also a configuration tool to automatically create the RTU databases and code.  This scheme was piloted during the upgrade of the Civic Zone Substation where some more equipment firmware issues were encountered and resolved. This design was substantially repeated in the new Eastlake Substation.