Grid Metering / Boundary Metering for State Transmission Company in North India

Customer: State Transmission Company (STC) in North India

Industry: Power Transmission

Scale: 5000+ Grid interface Energy meters 

Business Case: 

The STC sought to implement a smart system for Transmission Operations Management to enable the State Load Dispatch Center (SLDC) to manage daily business operations including scheduling, accounting, settlement, and invoicing of energy. In addition, they sought to ensure that business processes would be streamlined with necessary controls to reduce operational risks. The system needed to be capable of collecting meter data from more than 5000 grid interface energy meters of different types (ABT and ToD meters1 ) at specific time intervals every day. This data needed to be accessible to the Transmission Operations Management system to enable it with the essential input to handle scheduling, accounting, and settlement for multiple stakeholders, including solar and wind farm generators, thermal power generators, distribution utilities in the state, and open access customers. The STC wanted an automated meter reading system to retrieve 15-minute interval meter data from ABT and ToD meters using DCU’s, modems, and a head-end system to publish it to the central database of the Transmission Operations Management system. 

The Solution: 

The solution included 1) SYNC2000 as data concentrator/protocol gateway to send all the data to MDAS 2) MDAS on kalki.io platform 3) Eltrix DOPS for Transmission Operation Management  system

Kalki.io was selected to facilitate the collection of metering data from multiple locations spread across the state and to centrally aggregate it. Meters were connected through the SYNC2000 data concentrator installed in each location that connects to kalki.io over a cellular network. The data can be easily and securely accessed remotely by users and applications. Since the operations management system required access to meter data, kalki.io was ideal because of its simple mechanism to access data using REST APIs over JSON format. Kalki.io successfully demonstrated its ability to acquire data from multiple locations and centrally aggregate it, making it available for the Eltrix DOPS system handling the settlements. 

Key Benefits:

• This enabled the transmission operations management to enable the load dispatch center to manage daily business operations including scheduling, accounting, settlement, and invoicing of energy with necessary controls to reduce operational risks.
• It provided the utility the complete capabilities of doing central device management, security, and redundancy, providing a powerful yet easy-to-manage comprehensive solution. 
• It provided utility complete features of MDAS use cases including configuring and viewing custom dashboards, reports, group firmware management, monitoring synchronization, detailed reports on the energy usage, monitoring the signal strength variations, etc.
• The detailed bandwidth management in SYNC and Kalki.io enabled the customers to have high availability of the meter data even when there were problems in cellular networks.
• The system offered had the option to migrate to a completely redundant system which ensured that single point failures did not affect the data transfer and its use-cases.
• Complete system security is ensured with complete standard-based security implementations (IEC62351, NERC CIP, IEEE1686) which included TLS 1.3 based tunnel, role-based access control, detailed scenarios of AAA, etc.