ENWIN Utilities Ltd. - Survalent | Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS)

The Challenge

ENWIN Utilities Ltd. (ENWIN) is a Canadian licensed electricity distribution company, responsible for the local distribution of power, and the service and maintenance of its infrastructure. In recent years, ENWIN’s customers (mix of residential and commercial) have added new solar generation assets under Ontario’s Feed-In-Tariff (FIT) program and other Distributed Energy Resources (DER) as well. ENWIN needed a solution to monitor and, where permissible, control the generation assets in their territory. In addition, as new assets come online, they needed to be easily added to the existing platform.

ENWIN has been using the SurvalentONE platform for many years; it was the logical solution to bridge the isolation between various solar providers and bring them onto the common platform. The high-level technical requirements included the ability to:

Monitor solar assets for improved situational awareness
Communicate with providers with varied infrastructure
Access a secure, fast, and cost-effective solution
Provide alert reporting for dropouts from the network for security reasons

The Solution

ENWIN is currently using SurvalentONE to monitor the FIT program and other DER assets in their service territory, and they have the ability to control these assets as well. They leverage the platform, along with their in-house communications solution between the DERs and their operations centre. The solution uses VPN connections to establish a secure connection through a firewall to each solar site and pull-in data via a standalone SCADA server. This aggregate data is available to operators on a per feeder basis, to determine the impact of operational decisions, such as transferring load from one feeder to another. In addition, ENWIN is using this standalone SCADA server to support CHP generation of approximately 14 MW. In total, the solution is used to manage approximately 37 MW of distributed generation.

SurvalentONE provides a common user interface for all FIT projects and aggregates all the DERs data in one place. SurvalentONE also supports interoperability with devices from multiple manufacturers and a large suite of industry-standard protocols, which made it the perfect solution for ENWIN. Some of the other benefits realized by ENWIN include:

Reliable and instantaneous access to power generation information through a single interface
Improved situational awareness and responsiveness, enabling faster decision making
Scalable to easily include additional DERs as and when they are added to the distribution grid
Cost savings achieved through remote monitoring and control of field devices

ENWIN Utilities Ltd. (ENWIN) is a Canadian licensed electricity distribution company, responsible for the local distribution of power, and the service and maintenance of its infrastructure.

One Platform Reduces Costs & Improves Situational Awareness

The Challenge

The Solution

Request More Information