CONtROL ROOM COOL
>>
in the Beginning…
HK Electric started operation on
1 December 1890 at 6 pm and lit up
Hong Kong’s first electric street lights
in the Central Business District.
BaCk in the day…
Before 1969, there was no system control
centre in HK Electric. In the old days,
the telephone operators working in the
Transmission and Distribution Division were
responsible for taking down reports from
customers regarding supply interruptions
and then passed them to the duty area
engineers for action.
In 1969, a System Control Desk was
attached to the North Point Power Station
Control Room. Two years later, system
control engineers officially took over the
responsibility to monitor and control of the
transmission and generation system. But it
was only in 1974 that the first System Control
Centre was established on Kennedy Road.
After over 11 years’ of service, this centre
was replaced by a more advanced and well-
equipped one in the Apleichau Operational
Headquarters in 1985. The existing System
Control Centre, the third generation in the
series, was officially opened in July 1999
to take over the control and monitoring
work of the entire HK Electric electricity
supply system, including the generation,
transmission and distribution of power.
and in the modern day...
Since 1990, electricity generation has
been entirely carried out at Lamma Power
Station. The Lamma Power Station and
Lamma Power Station Extension have a total
installed capacity of 3,737MWwith eight
coal-fired units, five gas turbine units, one
wind turbine, one solar power system and
two combined cycle units.
The System Control Centre reached a new
milestone in July 1999 when it was moved to
the Electric Tower and at the same time had
its new Energy Management System (EMS)
and Distribution Management System (DMS)
commissioned to replace the old System
Control Centre in Apleichau Operational
Headquarters. The design of the new centre
takes into account operational needs and
places special attention on human factors.
The new EMS and DMS employ a Siemens
EMPOWER Spectrum systemwith a
distributed open system architecture. The
EMPOWER Spectrum uses state-of-the-art
technology and is characterised by easy
upgradability and extensibility. Both the EMS
and DMS are built with full redundancy for
all hardware including LAN to ensure that no
function is lost due to a single point of failure.
In addition to the normal supervisory control
and data acquisition (SCADA) functions,
the systems also come with special SCADA
functions, advanced applications and links to
other systems such that automatic control
functions, timely, relevant and accurate
information plus analytical tools are available
to System Control Engineers for effective
control and operation of the HK Electric
power system as well as prediction and
management of contingencies.
The principal functions of the system
control room are to monitor and control the
company’s power system, to handle power
system emergencies, as well as to provide
information to the Customer Emergency
Services Centre for answering customer
enquiries. In the control room, it contains
EMS consoles, DMS consoles and an
operator training simulator. One assumes
that it would take an army to coordinate
this operation.
One would assume wrong.
somany relyon so few
In order to get the full picture,
Sphere
reached
out to the head of the control room – Mr CS
Leung. To join the nerve centre of HK Electric,
Mr Leung explained that the personnel have
to be good at making decisions and handling
stress, as there are always timely decisions to
be made. Mr Leung let us in on a surprise: this
nerve centre runs round-the-clock in three
shifts with only three or four System Control
Engineers in each shift. While this may seem
normal for smaller operations, this is the
electricity supply for over 1.2 million people
in the world’s most vertical city. Millions of
escalators, lifts, major train systems, traffic,
water pumps, air conditioning and much,
much more – all being watched over by three
to four engineers.
The whole room controls and monitors all
generation units in the power station, tens
of switching/zone substations and more
than 3,000 distribution substations. The
engineers also coordinate responses to
all equipment outages in the generation,
transmission and distribution systems.
In order to improve the supply reliability,
the Distribution Fault Isolation Expert
System (DFIES) has been developed
which can identify and analyse the faults
in the 11kV system within 15 seconds. The
DFIES not only identifies problems such
as sections of faulty cable, but also makes
recommendations for actions to be taken by
expertly trained System Control Engineers.
Contingency plans are prepared and laid out
and studied by the engineers. As a result,
supply restoration for unplanned outages in
11kV system are normally completed within
one to five minutes.
About 1.2 million people residing on Hong
Kong Island, plus millions more who go to
work, dine and shop there every day, rely
on this skeleton crew to see, move and
survive. It is unlikely that, throughout history,
so many have unknowingly depended so
much on so few and is a testament to the
organisational power that has, as its focal
point, the Control Room.
hongkong electric
SpHere
#34
2013
24
