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Emergency power loading for utilities with GE

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CIOL Bureau
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CHARLOTTESVILLE, US: Mission-critical facilities such as hospitals, waste water plants, data centers, process-intensive, high-value manufacturing, large commercial buildings, government installations and other CI&I Utility loads typically require full-rated or near full-rated emergency power systems for life safety or economic loss prevention.

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These systems often involve redundant generators, buses and feeders for loads—providing power to the facility to maintain operations in the event of a utility outage. Meeting emergency power requirements is a large expense, for which power is used only during utility outages. The majority of these power systems that have been or are being installed use transfer switches to separate loads from the utility during an outage, and connect the emergency generation.

The transfer switches are not designed to facilitate parallel operation of the utility and emergency generation plant, nor are the controls and protection schemes. Parallel operation of an onsite facility owned generation and the utility grid could offer operational and economic benefit to both the facility and the utility.

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GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, has announced that PowerSecure, headquartered in Wake Forest, North Carolina, has selected the company’s PLC families to be a part of its solution to meet utilities’ stringent requirements for the protection and control of distributed generation systems.

PowerSecure sought to provide a solution that would meet utilities’ stringent requirements for the protection and control of such DG systems. “We selected GE Fanuc’s PLCs as they are easily able to customize the I/O and programming to meet the scalable needs of a particular installation’s electrical topology,” said Brian Kisner, President, NexGear Business Unit, a division of PowerSecure International, Inc. “It is also extremely survivable, and that was a key attribute when PowerSecure selected the GE Fanuc line.”

PowerSecure had used hundreds of GE Fanuc PLCs in its power system solutions, including those for mission critical facilities. For its integrated, advanced switchgear and control system called NexGear, it decided again to leverage the flexibility and power of GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms’ PLC as a critical part of the NexGear system. It was imperative for the system to have the ability to perform protection, control and automation tasks to make the distributed generation system operate. The tight integration and open architecture of GE

The NexGear system is considered a SmartGrid solution as it provides control of distributed resources in the distribution system as well as employs intelligent diagnostics with communications. In addition, PowerSecure can meet its customers’ demands for reliability of their onsite power systems with NexGear.