Emerson Wins Contract to Install Ovation® SCADA System at PGE’s Biglow Canyon Wind Farm in Northwest Oregon

Emerson Automation Solutions 13/05/2009

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Emerson’s power industry expertise extends to burgeoning renewable energy market; Ovation technology helps wind farm quickly respond to fluctuating demand

Emerson Process Management announced today it has received a contract from Portland General Electric Company (PGE) to apply its Ovation® SCADA solution to the Biglow Canyon wind farm. The wind farm, which is PGE’s first wholly owned and operated wind farm, is located approximately 140 miles east of Portland, Ore.

Biglow Canyon is being built in three phases. Phase 1, comprising 76 Vestas wind turbines, became operational in December 2007 and has a generating capacity of 125 MW. Phase 2, comprising 65 Siemens wind turbines, is expected to be up and running before the end of September 2009 with a capacity of approximately 150 MW. Phase 3 will have 76 additional Siemens turbines and be operational before the end of September 2010. PGE expects the total generating capacity for all three phases of the project to be 450 MW, producing enough annual energy to power roughly 120,000 homes.

Emerson is providing an enterprise-wide control solution for Biglow Canyon. The company’s Ovation SCADA platform will provide supervisory management of the entire wind farm (all three phases), interfacing to SCADA subsystems supplied by Vestas and Siemens that communicate with a total of four meteorological towers – two for each turbine OEM. Emerson will install its Ovation SCADA platform during a scheduled outage in July 2009.

In addition to collecting operational data from the Vestas and Siemens subsystems, the Ovation SCADA system will also gather data from substation controls and switchgear. This data includes actual produced power, capacity, line conditions, current, active power, reactive power, power factor and average values. The Ovation SCADA solution will allow automatic or manual control of the substation switchgear as well as perform automated supervisory voltage control. Providing supervisory management on one unified platform will streamline overall monitoring and control of the wind farm.

The Ovation solution will interface to the Vestas and Siemens SCADA systems via industry standard communication protocols without the need for traditional controllers and related I/O hardware. Instead, the Ovation SCADA solution will use PCs harnessing the power of Emerson’s virtual controller software technology, resulting in a fully robust solution with a reduced physical footprint.

“PGE currently utilizes Ovation technology at a number of our other power plants, so we were already very familiar with the capabilities it offered,” said Gary Tingley, engineering manager, PGE. “The ability of their Ovation SCADA system to provide a unified platform for the monitoring and control of Biglow Canyon’s entire fleet of wind turbines, regardless of manufacturer, was a key factor in our decision to select Emerson.”

Emerson’s SCADA solution features state-of-the-art monitoring, control and diagnostic functionality that optimizes renewable energy generation operations. It supports connections to a variety of equipment used in renewable energy sites, including turbine controllers, mirror assemblies, substation controls, meteorological towers and switchgear. The Ovation SCADA solution also supports multiple communication network types, such as dial-up, leased lines, and wireless.

Emerson’s solutions for renewable energy are derived from more than a century of experience providing proven technologies for a variety of energy generating assets, including coal-fired, combined cycle and cogeneration units, according to Bob Yeager, president of the Power & Water Solutions division of Emerson. “Ovation was built specifically to meet the unique challenges of the power generation industry and, for the past 20 years, we have built upon our successful fossil-fuel foundation to develop automation strategies for alternative energy resources, including hydro-electric, solar and of course, wind,” explained Yeager. “As power generators around the world diversify their generating assets by investing in alternative energy resources, Emerson is uniquely qualified to help our customers best manage their renewable generation assets.”

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