Location
Ratingen
Year
2015 until today
Products
FW-50, FW-50-14
Protocol
Stadtwerke Ratingen is a multi-utility company that offers electricity, natural gas, heat and drinking water in one go. The public utility is also responsible for running public street lighting and public baths. The KomMITT Ratingen GmbH subsidiary is also forcing through the expansion of fibre-glass communication networks and professional measuring services.
Over 240 employees provide optimum energy supplies to approximately 91,600 inhabitants in the supply region 88.7 km2 in size. Around 1,290 km of modern electrical power lines and its own command centre staffed 24/7 generate energy sales of around 510 million kWh (2015). The energy feed into the electrical distribution networks is based on three substations and three key stations from the 110kV network belonging to the Transmission System Operator, Westnetz GmbH. The public utility converts the electrical energy on the secondary coil of the power transformers. Distribution to an extended 10-kV-medium voltage network is done by means of highly-modern distribution stations. The medium voltage network has around 550 DSO transformer stations and 135 private customer transformer stations in which the medium voltage is stepped down to the low-voltage of 400V/230V used in homes.
According to the EnWG (German Energy Industry Act), operators of power supply systems are required to operate a secure, reliable and powerful energy supply network neutrally, and to maintain and optimise this network as and when required, to reinforce and extend it to the extent economically reasonable.
“Based on the system relevance for telecontrol, to ensure a secure telecontrol system regeneration of relevant operating equipment it was important for us to hire an established marketplayer”, according to Dipl.-Ing. Rainer Schermuly, Head of power supply at the Ratingen public utility. “This meant choosing the potential firms was not an easy undertaking for us”. The basic requirement was that a single provider would be able to take care of all service aspects such as drawing up concepts, building, configuration, commissioning up to complete documentation of the installed system parts.
We also considered the customer focus of the partner company very relevant. What matters is that once the risk transfer had taken place, competent contact per-sons were available to use in the event of a fault or if we had some specialised questions.”
In November 2015, Stadtwerke Ratingen GmbH award-ed the contract to SAE IT-systems GmbH & Co. KG to alter the telecontrol system in three substations and three key stations after comparing several offers. The order comprised:
All data points must be connected via terminals in the substations. In the largest substation – UA Ratin-gen – three net-line FW-50 are installed in the BGT-L, with a total of 370 digital inputs, 56 measured value inputs and 64 command outputs with corresponding return information, inclusive of 1/n monitoring and measuring circuit tests. In the smallest key station, a large rack (also net-line FW-50-14) was adequate for a total of 48 digital inputs, 16 measured value inputs and 16 command outputs with their corresponding return information; also with 1/n monitoring and measuring circuit tests here too. With the energetic support of the Stadtwerke Ratingen GmbH project leader, Mr Jan Maurmann, commissioning and all of the work associated with it could be implemented briskly and to the fullest satisfaction of Stadtwerke Ratingen GmbH.
After completing the replacement measures in the trans-former stations and key stations, a gradual replacement of remote control positions in the gas pressure control systems, the pressure booster systems and waterworks of Stadtwerke Ratingen GmbH is planned for 2017. In addition, new staff are to be hired in the area of telecontrol as it is becoming more and more important to be able to model different network states in real time. Thanks to the telecom subsidiary KomMITT Ratingen GmbH, the public utilities are already well positioned when it comes to the extending telecommunication fibre glass networks.
The preparations for extending an information security management system based on DIN ISO/IEC 27001:2015-03 have been addressed with appropriate certificate. Due to the size of the company, Stadtwerke Ratingen GmbH is not required to obtain certification before the 2018 financial year, but despite that it has already begun preparations for reaching its information security tar-gets in order to extend appropriate security organisation and develop the necessary processes. An IT security officer has been appointed which will from now on be involved in all projects with a relevance to IT security as a means of taking into account safety-relevant aspects in the planning phase. In the context of the pending certification, all security-relevant IT components are subject to a stringent selection process. This includes, in particular, telecontrol system components. Stadtwerke Ratingen GmbH are on the safe side with SAE products as the company has already integrated an extensive range of security technology into its telecontrol systems and has taken on far-reaching optimisations to its own infrastructures and processes. SAE is also aiming for certification based on DIN ISO/IEC 27001 and has begun a project to this end.