Internet based transmission substation monitoring

At the IEEE T&D Conference and exposition held in 1996 in Los Angeles, the authors presented the development of an on-line distributed information monitoring system for keeping track of the condition of HV equipment in transmission substations, such as status of each SF₆ circuit breaker (CB) together with other operational parameters, transformer temperature, capacitor bank unbalanced currents and auxiliaries including pumps, batteries and compressors etc. Each group of CBs is monitored by a standalone microcontroller where information can be exchanged between them on a local area network. A substation for the new Hong Kong International Airport was constructed revealing the shortfalls of the existing system because the substation had been too remote from the maintenance centres. The engineers in charge of transmission need to know not only the real-time status of equipment but also the security and fire safety of the substation. Furthermore, organisations involved in airport operation need to gain access to the information as well. Therefore, the original information system has been enhanced and extended by giving up the old idea of using modem based one-to-one communication and replacing it by an Internet based client server concept. The idea of remote vision for substation monitoring is also employed for integration with the Internet based system