The Electric Current December 2021 | Page 8

“ We were experiencing partial loss of function in one of our substations ,” said Jose Cordova , Engineering Operations Manager at Glades . “ One of the RTUs had four feeders , and there were times they would not respond to commands consistently . We also had a recloser that was not operating properly .”
Compounding the issue was virtually non-existent technical support from their vendor despite paying a fixed annual service contract above and beyond the product licensing fees . “ We had service tickets that were months old that were never resolved ,” said Cordova .
A contributing factor to Glades ’ difficulty in resolving their technical issues quickly was their vendor ’ s use of a proprietary communications system between their RTUs and SCADA .
“ The communication between the devices was proprietary technology , and so we were unable to resolve the issues on their own ,” said Cordova . “ When issues arose at a substation , it required us to deploy personnel to sort out issues manually , which eliminates the remote management benefits the system is supposed to deliver .”
So when one of Glades ’ RTUs in a substation failed completely in February 2020 , they decided to search for a replacement from a new vendor .
The search for a new system “ We started our search for a replacement by surveying our system and establishing priorities based on what was not working or working less than opti-
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