Centralised control and monitoring solution for power company

12 January 2016

With the help of Unitronics, Rene Tomingas FIE facilitates the use of over 80% of city's heat energy from renewable sources.

Rene Tomingas FIE of Estonia has been bringing PLC & SCADA systems, engineering, development and startups to industries such as water treatment, energy and heating plants for over 20 years.The company needed to centralise control and a also needed a monitoring system for its different plants.

new 8MW thermal oil heating and 1MW ORC electrical power plant in Estonia needed to be safely connected to an existing SCADA system and also needed to share data with the grid manager SCADA system, all while using different protocols. The ORC system is factory built, so by default, it is linked to a Unitronics competitor's PLC (and cannot be changed).The solution was the use of two Vision1040 PLCs. The first Vision1040 would control the 8MW woodchip boiler. The second would control the thermal oil systems, retrieve data from another vendors PLC, and share that data with the SpecView SCADA system which delivers that data via IEC104S protocol to the grid manager SCADA system.

The existing plant operator control and SCADA system is done through the Modbus-TCP protocol and a pair of local and remote Vision570™PLCs within the plant. One PLC could now connect different subsystems, and collect data from different sources (PLCs) with different protocols. It could also share the collected data online with a central SCADA system using generic Modbus protocols.

Founder and President Rene Tomingas said "Since using Unitronics, we now have great connectivity using Modbus-RTU and TCP protocols. It is simple to configure different solutions, and saves us a lot of time and money; especially with their free programming software. A huge benefit is the integrated operator panel. There is no need to use separate hard and software for the visualisation purposes. We also received fast delivery, and were impressed with their stock. Thanks to this plant, and the help of Unitronics, the city of Rakvere, Estonia will start to use more than 80% of their heat energy from renewable sources.

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