Fima, the leader in intelligent engineering solutions in Lithuania by mid-2010 will upgrade the management system in power substations of Kėdainiai district, which are owned by Rytų Skirstomieji Tinklai (RST). The company shall install a SCADA management system that will help dispatcher staff to identify the causes of failures within the power grid and renew power supply to the public faster.

“The Kėdainiai unit still operates a Soviet-era management system that does not always transfer data on grid failures to the dispatcher post in bad weather. We then have to send a brigade to the substation to look for the breakdown, hence it takes longer to restore power supply to the public. After the new management system is installed in substations, substation supervision will become much more efficient and this will help us ensure quality supply of power to the customers,” Director of RST’s Substation and Management Systems Department Ligitas Bernatavičius has said. According to him, thanks to the SCADA system RST dispatchers will get accurate information on power supply failures as soon as they occur, eliminating the need to wait for power users to report them. Thus it will take significantly less time to fix power grid breakdowns in extreme weather conditions.

In the words of Vladas Liuolia, the Director of Fima’s E-automatic Solutions Department, the problem with the management system that is currently in place in Kėdainiai is that it uses power lines to transfer data, and if there has been a failure in the system, data transmission breaks down, too. “The advantage of the SCADA management system will be that it is going to be based on radio communication. The Kėdainiai dispatcher station will have a 45-metre towers built to guarantee reliable transmission to data from 13 substations,” Liuolia has said.

The management system SCADA is one of the cornerstone engineering systems for infrastructure sites, designed to collect and analyse grid data. This system has been adopted by many Lithuanian and global power, water and gas supply companies. Fima has installed a similar system in the Šilutė – Šilalė unit of Vakarų Skirstomieji Tinklai as well. On top of that, Fima has outfitted RST’s central dispatch station in Vilnius, to which information from all of RST’s units is transmitted.