FEATURE | OPERATIONS

WATER OPERATIONS:
SECURITY OF SUPPLY – MONITORING
POWER STATUS OF REMOTE
WATER FACILITIES BY KEVIN STEWART AND GRAHAM NASBY

C
ontrary to what your parents said,
electricity and water do mix! In
fact, for any water utility, a reli-
able electricity supply is essen-
tial to keeping the water on and ensuring
regulatory compliance. Pumps require
electricity to operate, and the SCADA
(supervisory control and data acquisition)
system needs electricity to monitor/control
process equipment and log critical compli-
ance data. However, effectively monitoring
the electricity supply to water facilities is
challenging. For example, Guelph Water
has 30 remote facilities, all unstaffed, with
each having its own individual power feeds.
Thus, when there is a storm, or there are
problems in the hydro utility’s power lines, it
is imperative that operators know which sites
have power and which do not. Furthermore
remote monitoring is needed to check on
the status of generators, automatic trans-
fer switches, and uninterruptable power
supplies (UPSs). Using this power status
information, the operations team can then
effectively determine when, and in what
order, to check on facilities – or make process
adjustments – during power outages.
At Guelph Water, each of the 35 SCADA
programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that
are distributed through our water facili-
ties is equipped with a UPS. The UPSs keep
the PLCs online during power outages, so
the SCADA system can continue logging
ALL IMAGES COURTESY CITY OF GUELPH

process data and providing monitoring/

control connectivity to the centralized
SCADA system. The UPS units are sized to
provide at least 30 minutes of runtime for
the PLC, which is enough time to cover
over 95 per cent of power outages. As part
of this setup, the PLCs also look after shut-
ting off process equipment at the start of
Figure 1 – UPS (interruptible power supplies) are used to keep PLC panels online during
short power interruptions and to keep PLC panels online while on-site generators are a power outage, and re-starting facilities
starting up. Notice the communications network card in the back of the UPS. once stable power returns.

18 | O N T A R I O P I P E L I N E | SPRING 2018
Monitoring Power Statuses
To ensure security of supply, Guelph
Water embarked on a project in 2017 to
enhance the monitoring of electrical power
at all of its sites. This included the addition of
power status relays to PLC panels, improved
generator status monitoring, monitoring of
(electrical) Automatic Transfer Switches, and
adding communication cards to monitor the
status of UPS units. Monitoring both small
PLC panel UPSs and large facility UPSs was
also included in the project.
Starting in 2013, Guelph Water had
already started on a project to standard-
ize the typical UPS units it uses. For PLC
panels, a standardized 1500 VA UPS from
a reputable manufacturer was selected, so
that only one set of spare units and spare
batteries had to be stocked. For larger UPS
units, a process of selecting units closely
matched to individual site requirements
was used, while ensuring the appropriate
vendor support agreements were in place.
UPS Communications
Part of the UPS selection process was to go
with enterprise grade UPS units. This meant
ensuring that each UPS would have certain
core technical features and the capability
of having a network communications card
added. In our case, we went with an Ethernet
UPS network card so we could leverage the
existing SCADA network, use standardized
Ethernet-based protocols, and have access
to a diagnostic webpage for each UPS.
For our PLC panel UPSs, we selected
APC Smart UPS 1500 units with AP9630
Figure 2 – Protocol Converter Module
which was used to interface the SCADA
system to the UPSs network cards
via Ethernet.
network management cards. This selection
was made based on our count of existing
UPS units plus available technical features.
It should be noted that other UPS vendors
also have similar configurations available
in their product lines. For our larger facility
UPS units we installed the corresponding
Ethernet network cards for those units.
We avoided the use of serial protocols and
relay-based UPS interfaces as we wanted to
ensure that each UPS would have a built-in
diagnostic webpage accessible for trouble-
shooting via the SCADA network.
Connecting the UPSs to the SCADA
system did involve some challenges. We
originally wanted to connect using the
Modbus TCP protocol, as we already had a
Modbus driver installed in our SCADA soft-
ware. However, we discovered the Modbus
interface of the UPS network cards did not
include all the status monitoring points we
wanted. Instead, we elected to use SNMP
(simple network management protocol),
which is a communications protocol widely
used in the IT sector. All of our UPS units,
including both the PLC panel UPSs and
the large facility UPSs, also supported the
SNMP protocol.
Since SCADA systems do not read-
ily speak SNMP, we used a centralized
Ethernet-to-Ethernet protocol converter
module. For our system we used a device
called a “Babel Buster” for this role, though
it should be noted there are a several mod-
ules available from variety of vendors that
could be used. We used the Babel Buster
to convert the SNMP protocol’s OID (object
Identifiers) into Modbus holding registers
that the SCADA system could read. The
Babel Buster also provided a web-based
setup utility that used XML configuration
files that can be readily uploaded/down-
loaded via its web interface.
Using the UPS Data
Once we could read the UPS status data
into the SCADA system, the next step was
to put it into a format that could be used
by the Operations Team. This was accom-
plished by designing a power status screen
that provided the power feed, generator,
ATS and UPS statuses for all sites on one
HMI (human-machine interface) screen.
The intent was to have a single HMI screen
that operators could use to get an overview
view of the power status across the entire
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 Figure 3 – A single status screen was added to the SCADA system so operators could see power status of all water facilities at a glance.
water utility at a glance. Part of this screen
is shown in Figure 3.
The screen features a standardized status
row for each site. Each status row consists
of: the site’s overall power status; if there
is an ATS or MTS fitted (automatic or man-
ual transfer switch); the type and status of
onsite generator if there is one; the status
of power feeding the PLC panel; and the
status of any UPSs on site. The percent of
battery left and remaining runtime for UPS
is also shown. An on-screen legend is pro-
vided for reading the compactly arranged
UPS status indicators. Also, if there is histori-
cal equipment (e.g. older standalone ATS
units) that are not yet monitored by SCADA
this information is provided to operators.
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Using the new Power Status screen in the
SCADA system, operators now can quickly
achieve situational awareness of the power
status of Guelph Water’s facilities at any
time. This screen is available at all SCADA
terminals, and is now used extensively
whenever storms or hydro utility problems
are affecting the power feeds to Guelph
Water’s 30 remote facilities. Armed with this
knowledge, the operation team can now
make better decisions based on real-time
data as to which sites to visit, including
when and in what order, during a power
interruption event.
Kevin Stewart is a third-year engineering stu-
dent at the University of Guelph in Guelph,
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Ontario. He recently completed a SCADA
developer co-op placement at Guelph Water
Services. Kevin, originally from Kingston
Ontario, is enrolled in the UofG’s B.Sc.(Eng.)
Engineering Systems and Computing pro-
gram. kstewa11@uoguelph.ca
Graham Nasby, P.Eng, PMP, CAP holds
the position of Water SCADA & Security
Specialist at City of Guelph Water Services,
a publicly-owned water utility located in
Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He is a member
of both OWWA and WEAO, and currently
sits on the OWWA Automation Committee.
Graham is also co-chair of the ISA112
SCADA Systems Standards committee.
graham.nasby@guelph.ca
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