Salt River Project (SRP) is a nearly $2.0 billion water and electric utility serving over 800,000 customers in Phoenix, Arizona. As competition in its area increases, SRP is always on the lookout for ways to offer customers better service and better power quality (PQ). While the company has had a power quality program in place for years, it is continually striving to excel in this arena. Recently, SRP decided to expand upon the common utility practice of documenting outage frequency and duration to also include a system to measure voltage sags. Utilities generally focus their efforts heavily on system reliability, but pay less attention to power quality issues like voltage sags because these events don't cause widespread outages and only affect customers who are sensitive to voltage fluctuations.

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The Salt River Project (SRP) Hassayampa Switchyard is a 500kV transmission facility with 10 bays, handling power flowing to and from four different independent power producers and several other substations. SRP needed combined instrument/transformer loss compensation and power factor monitoring, plus aggregation and scaling of real-time data. A PowerLogic ION® system from Square D®/Schneider Electric delivered this functionality at an affordable price. Transformer and instrument losses are measured from the secondary side, saving installation costs without sacrificing accuracy. Substation bays operate as four loops, with PowerLogic ION8000 series meters configured as Modbus Master devices, each gathering real-time data from its loop to perform scaling and aggregation before passing values to a central RTU. The network fully integrates with the MV-90 billing system and provides a valuable backup function - if the RTU or communication links fail, the data can be retrieved manually from any meter. When generators go online and merchant sites produce their own power, the breakers close and the meters go offline. Information is shared among authorized users, and advanced security features ensure that confidential data is going only to the right place, and nowhere else.

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Limited access to natural resources, such as water and oil, challenge the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to provide its five million residents with a secure source of reliable and affordable energy. The country is building a national energy-information infrastructure to monitor energy transactions and billing between the newly independent power generation, transmission, and distribution companies. Each separate company must accurately monitor and communicate to all market participants everything from the quantity and quality of power produced and delivered, to up-to-the-minute billing and time-of-use data. An energy and power monitoring system from Power Measurement (now part of Schneider Electric) using a network of 150 intelligent, GPS time-synchronized meters linked to four software servers, tracks and verifies all energy transactions. A parallel metering network confirms consistency and accuracy of all data and parallel servers, equipped with identical energy management and billing software, sit at each company's headquarters to receive information from all metering points. This reliable, synchronized, countrywide enterprise energy management system has set the stage for a competitive, financially viable environment for the production and sale of electricity.

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Oncor, the regulated energy delivery business within Dallas-based TXU Corporation, is the first company in the United States to rely on high speed Ethernet to transmit energy production data from merchant power plants to the Independent System Operator (ISO). The information is used for transaction settlement and billing, and Ethernet provides a more cost effective, reliable, and secure solution than intermittent modem links.

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Rio Grande Electric Cooperative (RGEC) in Brackettville, Texas, provides electric service to over 10,000 metering points across Texas and New Mexico. Traditionally, the company's commitment to providing a reliable source of power across 27,000-square-miles of barren terrain has presented some interesting challenges; just to check and service remote substations, maintenance crews routinely faced driving times of up to seven hours each way. So when RGEC's Technical Services department considered upgrades to the co-op's electrical metering equipment, the question of communications was paramount. Here was an opportunity to monitor the status of the entire distribution network, while reducing the amount of time technicians must spend on the road - but how could they communicate with remote substations where telephone coverage was sparse, and cellular networks practically nonexistent? As part of a planned upgrade to a full PowerLogic® ION® system from Square D®/Schneider Electric, RGEC identified satellite communications as the answer. Combining reasonable costs with unlimited flexibility, satellite stood out as the most cost-effective way to support reliable communications between the energy-management software installed at the headquarters, and the network of intelligent energy meters destined for the remote substations.

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Vector is one of New Zealand's largest network infrastructure companies with a portfolio of businesses and services delivering electricity, gas, and high-speed broadband voice and data communications throughout New Zealand. One of Vector?s core businesses is the delivery of high quality and reliable power to customers. To support their customer satisfaction goals, Vector recently upgraded its bulk metering system. The upgrade provided Vector with an opportunity to take the first steps toward an "intelligent substation" solution. The vision included direct data transmission over the Internet as well as high-speed Ethernet, automatically generated reports for data sharing within the company and with customers, and advanced power quality analysis.

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Serious reductions in energy costs require gathering, analyzing data.

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Recently, one of our customers provided an interesting anecdote on how the PowerLogic system helped them pre-empt a potentially significant energy waste at their plant.

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San Diego State University (SDSU) is a respected institution of higher-learning, and among other things, is particularly well-known for its research expenditures and undergraduate International Business program. It's the largest university in San Diego and the third-largest in the state of California. With today's larger university campuses operating as almost cities unto themselves, their energy and power needs have become more and more demanding and the need for reliability is paramount. In SDSU's case, being located in California adds an additional layer of challenges when you take into account the state?s well-documented history of energy issues - including consistent shortages and outages - both things that could cripple its sprawling campus. Just one such incident has the potential to halt or even damage important research, postpone classes and athletic events, and leave the over 33,000 students enrolled without power. The man charged with monitoring and analysis of SDSU's campus is Bill Lekas. His experience in the field of energy management spans almost 25 years, and Lekas' management of the SDSU campus has not gone unnoticed by his peers. In 2006, he was named Manager of the Year in Region 5 by the Association of Energy Engineers (ACE). Additionally, SDSU Physical Plant was presented with an award for sustainability from UC-Santa Barbara for best practices for Monitoring Based Commissioning with the SDSU Library and Science buildings.

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McCormick, South Carolina, near the Georgia border, is the seat of McCormick County. The town’s Commission of Public Works operates a number of infrastructure systems, including a town-owned wastewater treatment facility and a distribution system for electrical energy that it purchases in bulk from South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G).

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