The building blocks of a distribution telecontrol system

The regional electricity companies in the UK face the challenge of having to reduce the fault restoration time. One of the solutions is to remotely monitor and control strategically positioned switches in both rural and urban 11 kV distribution networks to enable fast reconfiguration. Standard catalogue products, which form part of a complete secondary distribution telecontrol system, will enable the user to implement these schemes economically. The main feature of the system proposed in this paper is its high degree of integration. This has been achieved by incorporating the RTU card in a telecontrol cabinet and using an intelligent master RTU/control unit capable of handling multiple serial protocols to enable concurrent communication with the slave RTUs in the field, the PC based GUI and the main SCADA system. The advantage for the end user is that sole responsibility for the complete system is taken by the switchgear manufacturer