Rene Tomingas of Estonia has been bringing PLC & SCADA systems, engineering, development and startups to industries such as water treatment, energy and heating plants for over 20 years.
THIER NEED? Centralised control and a monitoring system for different plants across their country. Their new 8MW thermal oil heating and 1MW ORC electrical power plant in Estonia needed to be safely connected to an existing SCADA system and also share data with the grid manager SCADA system, all while using different protocols. The ORC system is factory built, so by default, it is linked to a Unitronics competitor’s PLC (and cannot be changed).
THE SOLUTION? Two Vision1040 PLCs were chosen for the task. The first Vision1040 would control the 8MW woodchip boiler. The second would control the thermal oil systems, retrieve data from Unitronics’ competitor’s PLC, share that data with their SpecView SCADA system which delivers that data via IEC104S protocol to the grid manager SCADA system. The existing plant operator control and SCADA system is done through the Modbus-TCP protocol and a pair of local and remote Vision570 PLCs within the plant. One PLC could now connect different subsystems, and collect data from different sources (PLCs) with different protocols. It could also share the collected data online with a central SCADA system using generic Modbus protocols.
Founder and president Rene Tomingas said, “Since using Unitronics, we now have great connectivity using Modbus-RTU and TCP protocols. It is simple to configure different solutions, and saves us a lot of time and money; especially with their free programming software. A huge benefit is the integrated operator panel. There is no need to use separate hard and software for the visualisation purposes. We also received fast delivery, and were impressed with their stock.”
Thanks to this plant, and the help of Unitronics, the city of Rakvere, Estonia will start to use more than 80% of their heat energy from renewable sources.
