Superior Speed & Distance Performance for Heysham 1 & 2
Handing off information between Generation and Transmission raises its own particular challenges, but when the Substation is 5,000m from the Power Station then things become a little trickier.
British Energy has two nuclear generator stations at its Heysham facility in Lancashire. Each has its own independently run Control Room until the point at which they connect to the National Grid system. At this point, a single set of redundant servers located at the 400kV Substation is required to communicate real time alarm information to each facility in turn. Without fibre optic or standard twisted pair communications cable installed the stakes were soon raised.
Elisys Engineering were contacted by British Energy in the hope that they could design and install a new communications system capable of providing reliable Ethernet data over unscreened straight multi-core cable.
Not only did the final solution prove more reliable than the existing and now obsolete system, but a 50 x improvement in performance was achieved through the use of QAM 4-band (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) Ethernet Extenders.
During the design phase of the project Elisys performed extensive in-house testing to be absolutely sure that they would choose the right technology for the job.
The Patton 2157 CopperLink™ Ethernet Extender supplied by Amplicon Liveline proved to be up to the task. The resultant bandwidth increase from 64K to nearly 4Mb now means that both Control Rooms can operate their respective SCADA workstations without any noticeable delay and with minimal downtime.
Since the success of this project Elisys has used similar solutions to connect Ethernet out to 400kV and 275kV Block Houses where only existing telephone cables were present. More Projects
