At the heart of New England’s energy future stands the Competitive Power Ventures Towantic Energy Center — a cutting-edge 785-MW powerhouse built to deliver reliable electricity when it’s needed most. Towantic Energy Center is a state-of-the-art, greenfield natural gas combined-cycle generating station. To connect this generating station to the power grid, McPhee Electric needed a modern, IEC 61850-based protection, control and automation system for Eversource Energy’s Towantic 3P 115-kV Switching Station.
Our team provided a complete IEC-61850 SCADA system and human-machine interface design, detailed engineering and design services, protection and control design, permitting support and system studies for the generating station and the greenfield Towantic 115-kV air-insulated switchyard that connected the power plant to the grid.
Powerful Redundancies
The Ethernet network facilitating the IEC 61850 communications was designed with multiple redundant physical connections for each intelligent electronic device; simultaneous redundant traffic between switches using the high-speed redundancy protocol; and a failover redundancy scheme for communications between each Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) and Ethernet switch. Signaling between the IEDs uses a combination of Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event and Manufacturing Message Specification protocols.
The monitoring and controls platform consists of redundant touchscreen human machine interface computers, and remote monitoring and controls are managed through redundant station remote terminal units.