SCADA Applications & Installations:
Sonoma County Water Agency - World Class SCADA
The Challenge:
In-house integration of a networked SCADA system to provide reliable control of the water distribution system and monitoring of hydroelectric generating facility and wastewater treatment plants.
The Solution:
Using Lookout to directly control over 60 RTUs over a radio network, and monitor the entire operation through T1 Ethernet lines to remote Lookout Servers.
Introduction:
The Sonoma County Water Agency is a water wholesaler and flood control district that also is responsible for several wastewater treatment facilities in the Sonoma County area. This diverse system provides water to about 600,000 residences in Sonoma and Marin counties, as well as sewage treatment for 15,340 Sonoma County customers.
The agency needed to replace an aging telemetry system with one that would allow them to continue their growth as their systems are upgraded and expanded in the Northern California area. Since the Agency has in-house electronic technicians and engineering programming resources, the decision was made to integrate a new system in-house. After an extensive review of most of the other major HMI/SCADA software packages, a "Big Name" package was purchased, rather than Lookout.
Samuel (Sam) Smith Jr., Engineering and Programming Manager said, "We purchased one of the products and got to the point of bringing up sites and discovered that the particular product was lacking in radio communications capability and severely impaired by the quality of customer support." About then an electronic technician, Don Swanz, brought in an early demo version of Lookout and was able to make the radio interface work in a couple of hours with the help of resident PLC expert, Roger Foote.
Sam recognized a good thing when he saw it. "At that point we started using Lookout and found that Lookout worked really well for our radio communications. Since most of our RTUs interface with radio communications, we went with it and we're glad we did."
Currently, the Lookout system at the Operations and Maintenance Center connects with over 60 RTU sites in the SCADA system mostly via analog radio, with a few over analog leased lines. Additionally, it connects with two remote Lookout Servers through T-1 lines at wastewater treatment plants Sonoma Valley CSD and Russian River CSD which about 50 miles away in opposite directions.
Sonoma County Water Agency has created a system which permits operation of all facilities from the O&M center in Santa Rosa, or remotely from either the Russian River WWTP or the Sonoma Valley WWTP. This allows operators on night or weekend shifts to stay at one of the remote locations in the event of local problems and still attend to their regular duties, without calling in additional operators to monitor at O&M.
"The in-house integration of the SCADA software into our system was a primary goal of the Agency." continued Sam Smith. "To make this possible, we attended a 2-day, hands-on, National Instruments' Lookout Basics Course that was taught by Tony Sannella of Sage Designs. After the 2-day course, we hit the ground running and we had Tony come in for a series of 16 half-day on-site classes to help as we got into the more advanced stuff that needed to be done in our own system. He was helpful in suggesting what the best practices were, and how to make what we wanted from the software come together smoothly."
At this point SCWA has 8 Lookout licenses, but they are far from finished. One of the licenses is for an unlimited client version that will allow the agency to publish some of their Lookout screens on their web site, if they decide to add some real-time data for public consumption. Whether or not they decide to publish Lookout screens on the web, authorized personnel will be able to log into Lookout from any of the 200+ Intranet browsers on their network and monitor the SCADA system from their desks.
According to Sam Smith, "We wanted a world-class SCADA system, and got one at a bargain price."
Sam Smith's phone number is available by calling Tony Sannella at Sage Designs, Inc., 1-888-ASK-SAGE or by using the Contact Form.
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Trademark Acknowledgments: Lookout is a trademark of National Instruments.
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