Benefits of a unified substation architecture for a small utility

Trico Electric Cooperative Inc (Trico) is a nonprofit cooperative serving more than 38,000 rural customers in southern Arizona. Trico is challenged with managing a distribution system with a wide geographical dispersion. Trico required a system to centralize, control and manage access to all of its substation devices and related data. Trico sought to diversify available substation information and to leverage this data into other enterprise systems and processes. To be cost-effective, the solution also needed to complement current devices and protocols, as well as leverage existing infrastructure. By implementing a unified substation architecture, access to SCADA as well as non-operational substation data has become centralized and more secure. Non-traditional substation data, such as event files, are made available to enterprise systems. This allows for faster event analysis and minimized outage time. Operations and engineering departments at Trico are now able to effectively control and manage communication with remote substation devices.