Emerson to Install SCADA System at Wind Farm
Emerson Process Management announced May 12 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 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 platform during a scheduled outage in July.
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.
"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."
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. 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."