Overview

Meridian Energy is New Zealand’s largest electricity generation company with entirely renewable energy sources. All its generation assets were managed from control centres using a Generation Control System (GCS) based on a Siemens Spectrum Power (TM) SCADA system that was commissioned in the late 1990s.

Commencing 2011, Meridian initiated a programme to document the current state of their systems, evaluate options, prepare a business case and execute a project to have a replacement system in operation by mid-2014. Meridian engaged PSC to provide specialist resources to research and document the current state of their GCS and supporting systems, and evaluate technical options for the project. It was decided the most cost-effective and least risk approach would be to carry out a version upgrade of the Siemens Power TG system and associated GCS infrastructure. PSC worked in conjunction with Siemens and Fujitsu to prepare and cost high-level designs for the system and replacement infrastructure, as part of the successful business case.

Project Outline

The implementation phase of the project commenced at the beginning of 2013, with Meridian engaging PSC’s Auckland-based SCADA team as the project’s system integrators. PSC also provided the Meridian project team with resources for physical plant design (based in Christchurch), PLS programming and OSIsoft PI work (based in Twizel), design manager and test manager (based in Wellington) and testing resources (based in Christchurch).

PSC’s integration team was the key interface with the SCADA supplier, Siemens.  Siemens was responsible for supply of product and for porting of the GCS system from Power TG v7.2 to v9.0.5, including porting a number of complex hydro and canal control optimisation applications.  PSC was responsible for integrating the packages received from Siemens, testing, debugging and resolving defects using a development environment located at PSC’s Auckland office, and deploying to the QA/Test and new Production environments at the Twizel data centre and the various power stations.

Outcome

Commissioning of the new GCS system was completed on schedule and the project remained within budget while meeting all its performance and testing objectives. PSC is pleased to have been able to assist Meridian Energy with this very successful project.