Southern Water, one of the UK's leading utility companies, is helping the National Grid to cope with peak electricity demand using its new standby generator control system, designed and developed in partnership with the CSE Servelec Group.

Southern Water is responsible for delivering clean, fresh water to about one million households in the South East of England. It also treats and recycles dirty water from nearly two million households.

As part of its £1.8 billion investment programme to further improve water and wastewater treatment, Southern Water has recently installed a control system to utilise 13 of its standby generators to supply electricity, on demand, to the National Grid with the help of UK-based CSE Seprol, part of the CSE Servelec Group of companies.

The primary purpose of the standby generators is to ensure that, in the event of a power failure, Southern Water is able to continue to supply its customers with their normal level of service.

The automatic control of the generators is carried out using a number of CSE Seprol Remote Telemetry Units (RTUs) in conjunction with sister company CSE Servelec's, SCOPE-X Telemetry System.

Phase One of the venture to assist the National Grid will see Southern Water provide an average of 10MW of power within half an hour of a request being received.

The National Grid is connected to Southern Water's Telemetry System via a CSE Seprol S500 RTU, communicating using Modbus protocol.

Also connected to the Telemetry System are 13 S250 RTUs, which locally operate the diesel powered standby generators.

When the National Grid requires extra power, a start signal is sent to the S500, which tells the Telemetry System to remotely start up the standby generators.

Among other signals sent to SCOPE X are individual 'power generated' levels so that the outputs can be monitored and the individual generators controlled to produce the required power output within a pre agreed limit.

The second phase of the venture will see an additional five sites implemented, which will increase the power supply to 15MW.

CSE Seprol's RTUs form a significant part of Southern Water's control infrastructure with over 1000 installed across the region.

July 2007