Tailored Solutions
Rio Nogales Delivery Station Remote Metering Project
Customer
Constellation Energy Group, Baltimore, Maryland
Goal
Delivering hourly gas flow meter data for the Rio Nogales Power Plant system to both MarkWest Pinnacle and Constellation Energy through a secure managed service.
Requirements
- Hourly Readings made available to multiple locations through web access
- Hourly readings must be gathered from three locations and aggregated
- File transfer of data is made upon request, typically every hour
- Secure access by authorized personnel only
- Provide field interface to existing, installed Fisher ROC gas flow meters
- Provide data through a managed service
Approach
Diverse organized this project into four phases:
Phase I: Service And Requirements Specification
- Conduct customer requirements/review sessions
- Identify feature sets for Constellation, Duke Energy and HPL Co.
- Obtain gas flow computer interface and programming specification
- Perform RF testing
- Develop requirements document
Phase II: System Design
- Choose base M2M platform design
- Choose equipment suppliers
- Choose communications service
- Create development and operational support specifications
- Create diagram (shown below)
Phase III: Development
- Develop protocol interfaces for Arcom Director processing units
- Develop calculation and aggregation algorithms to obtain hourly readings
- Program gas computers to allow polling
- Integrate hardware: processing unit, modem, antenna, power supply, NEMA 4 enclosure
- Develop Houston operations and data center interfaces
- Develop web interface for secure customer access
- Develop interface(s) for data file transfers
Phase IV: System Test And Installation
- Factory simulation test of three site configuration
- Communications service provisioning
- Physical installation and connection to gas flow computers
- Website portal activation and set-up
- Field acceptance test and commercialization of service
Solution
The diagram below details the configuration for the Rio Nogales Power Plant application as designed and operated by Diverse Networks. As part of our managed service, we provided local interface and wireless access equipment (remote gateways) for the Oasis, Duke, and Rio Nogales meter locations. The remote gateway collects the previous hourly flow readings from existing gas measurement systems and transmits the data to our Data Center in Houston using the wireless infrastructure of our telecommunications service partner. The previous hourly data from HPL is transferred directly into our infrastructure from HPL’s SCADA system in Houston using a secure file transfer protocol and the Internet.
The Diverse Network data center receives, processes and stores the previous hourly readings from all points, and makes the data available for viewing by authorized individuals using a standard Internet browser. Access to the data is restricted to authorized individuals using standard authentication and authorization procedures. In addition, the service transfers all previous hourly flow data into the Constellation computer system using a secure Internet file transfer protocol.
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