Substations

Optilan Engineers are specifically trained and highly experienced in working in electrical substation environments. Scopes of work include

• Cabling - Cabinet Works including Optical Fibre cable installation, fusion splicing, jointing termination and test.
• Ethernet Networks – design, installation and configuration of IEC 61850-compliant substation LANs with exceptional EMI immunity.
• Security systems – including secure and reliable teleprotection systems, and access control.
• Legacy systems – cabling, transmission and teleprotection systems audit, upgrade, maintenance and support.
  

Substations Fibre for Teleprotection Systems

Background – Historically Teleprotection systems on substations have been linked by using copper cables.  Over the last three years Optilan have been providing the upgrading of sites from copper to multimode fibre as part of the NGT NICAP E31002 project for a number of Prime Contractors. 

The teleprotection systems are systems critical and as such are designed with dual redundancy and diverse routing.  These systems run on multimode fibres which technically distinguish them from the singlemode systems on the Energis network that is often present on the same sites and the fibre on the overhead lines.  The sites share commonality in their implementation of redundancy and diversity through the adherence to NGT’s specifications.

Although many substations are quite small some of these fibre systems are very large.  Optilan’s largest site installation to date has been on one London site where a total of 650 fibre links were installed in one scheme.  Each site often presents specific design challenges for example bringing many hundreds of fibres back to one small Blockhouse.