INDUSTRIES & SOLUTIONS
PROMOTING SUSTAINABILITY VIA STANDARDIZATION To be more sustainable, we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and invest more in electricity from renewable sources. More electricity means more power plants, power lines, and substations as nodes for power lines. In Sweden, Svenska Kraftnät (SvK), the national transmission system operator for electricity and gas, is building or upgrading twenty extra-high voltage substations in 2023. Every substation needs a human machine interface (HMI). Rapid, automation-enabled configuration of the HMI application plays a small part in building substations and replacing old ones more quickly.
AN ENERGY TRANSITION FOR OUR WORLD Less CO2 and less fossil fuels is the goal. This means more electromobility, the electrification of industry, and heating with heat pumps. We must hurry up because time is running out. The climate emergency is already here, but we are not yet able to meet the increasing demand for electricity. Industry and its suppliers are switching to electricity, but we know that there are neither enough generators available nor enough lines and cables laid. As an example, for a distribution network operator in the Netherlands, the 55 MW power capacity of a substation was sufficient for 20 years. However, this situation changed within three months when the nearby industry switched from oil and gas to electricity. The substation capacity needed to more than double. This required installing an additional 60 MW transformer. With foresight, the planners built for the future and prepared a place for a third transformer. We hear something similar from Sweden: to route wind power from the north to the industrial south, new lines will have to be laid and twenty substations must be commissioned or upgraded in 2023 alone. This change is of unprecedented magnitude. It is a real challenge, especially since no changes can be made to existing systems during the frosty winter months. In Sweden, heating
is mainly provided by electricity, primarily through heat pumps. But heat pumps also need electricity. As a result, there is only a six-month window in which the twenty substations can be commissioned. This, in turn, means that approximately ten days are available per substation, if processed sequentially. Therefore, any support that can speed up the commissioning process is helpful. ZENON IS DOING ITS PART So how can zenon, as an HMI system for substations, do its part to help meet this challenging workload? Well, not all the secondary technology can be created, configured, and commissioned with zenon. zenon covers a small part of the functions required. But on its own, as an HMI, gateway, and automation component, it provides plenty of possibilities to speed up engineering and testing – and so do its part in upgrading and bringing new substations online more quickly and efficiently. How does this actually work? The best way to improve the efficiency of software projects is to standardize. It will always be quicker to orchestrate off-theshelf components. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! A good deal of work has already gone into a standard compo-
nent so that preliminary engineering activities no longer have to be carried out and thus can be avoided. In zenon, such components are available as base projects, symbols, and Smart Objects. COPA-DATA provides a lot of such preconfigured content, especially for substations. AUTOMATION-ENABLED ENGINEERING In addition to standardized components, zenon offers other engineering accelerators. You can wave our magic wand! That is, that of the zenon magician: the zenon wizard. A zenon wizard will not produce white rabbits from a black stovepipe, but it can create entire zenon projects automatically. The wizard can save users a lot of time through automation. Weeks of effort become hours. And hours are reduced to
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