Smart grid communications

Consumers require a continuous, reliable supply of electricity, and the need to control and monitor an ever more complex grid is increasing. For example, it is becoming increasingly common for consumers to produce their own electricity with solar cells. Any electricity surplus can be sent back to the grid and sold to other consumers. This requires the ability to monitor and control the very edge of the electricity grid. Today, very few secondary substations are connected to a control centre, but only having communication to the primary substations is not enough to ensure quality of service. With electricity companies having perhaps more than 100,000 secondary substations to manage from a single control centre, maintenance is usually reactive, making it harder to maintain the quality of energy supply. Given the high number of devices to be installed, ease of configuration and maintenance is a key to secure these projects are viable. These secondary substations can be spread over large geographical areas, without any supervision, but all connections need to be secure against cyber attacks.

Westermo solution

Westermo uses cellular communication to enable customers to reach secondary substations from their control centres, having the most robust and reliable cellular router in the market. Reliable remote access can help you to reduce the number of minutes of lost supply and the number of customer interruptions. Westermo’s MRD industrial cellular routers and Lynx switches offer the highest mean time between failures (MTBF) on the market, and its dual-SIM feature provides a redundant connection to control centres. The WeConfig network configuration tool offers a simple interface to all MRDs with easy configuration and centralised supervision. The routers offer protection against cyber attacks via a VPN and features a simple yet powerful firewall.

Key benefits

• Connect secondary substations with control centres using robust cellular communication
• MRD cellular routers have a dual SIM to offer a redundant connection to control centres
• WeConfig offers a simple interface to simplify configuration and provide centralised supervision
• Protect against attacks with features such as VPN and firewall