Westermo has helped Electricity North West to enhance cyber security and reduce the lifecycle costs of a data communications network which supports the electricity distribution network in the North West region.
Westermo industrial networking technology has been used to create a resilient IP-based network that has enabled the implementation of services such as NMS (Network Management Service) and CLASS (Customer Load Active System Services). These support Electricity North West’s goals of improving reliability of supply and creating operational savings that can be passed on to customers.
The IP-based data network connects well over 500 primary substations across a vast geographical area, enabling monitoring and controlling of equipment which reroutes power should problems arise. Previously, a VF serial-based network offered limited bandwidth, no redundancy and insufficient resilience. A lack of network reliability created high operational costs and resulted in regular faults that affected capital projects supporting quality of service programmes.
Westermo Wolverine Ethernet Line Extenders, based on SHDSL communications, enabled the Ethernet network to be created using existing copper cabling.
“Replacing the 11,000km of ageing copper cabling with fibre optic infrastructure was unfeasible in terms of budget and timescale, explained Lee Wakefield, telecoms transmission engineer, Electricity North West. “The use of Westermo’s Wolverine Ethernet Line Extenders eliminated the need to replace the cabling and made the project feasible by significantly reducing costs.”
“Almost 1,000 Wolverine devices were installed over a two-year period at the primary substations. With both time and engineering resources limited, it was crucial to minimise the number of visits to each site. Westermo’s WeConfig configuration software supported this by enabling the configuration, diagnostics and testing tasks to be performed at a central location. An estimated 2,100 engineering hours (300 work days) were saved and this efficiency improvement was critical in enabling the project to be completed on time and to budget.
“The Westermo technology provides Electricity North West with the capability to monitor and trend the performance of the network connections to the primary substations. This enables potential issues to be identified at an earlier stage and better scheduling of cable maintenance to prevent unexpected network downtime. Better planning reduces the cost of doing the work and enables better use of our internal resources.”
The combination of implementing a reliable IP network, and the ability to identify cable issues, has reduced the time spent on callouts maintaining the data network by approximately 2,100 working hours a year.
