Neoenergia is implementing the SISCON Project, which will develop the new Control System of the company, bringing together technology and process change to improve the management of the energy grids of its  concessionaires - Coelba (BA), Celpe (PE), Cosern (RN) and Elektro (SP/MS) - benefiting over 14 million customers. To do so, it will use Siemens' Spectrum Power system, also adopted by its parent company, the Spanish Iberdrola, in a global initiative involving some 40 employees from several countries, such as Brazil, Spain, Austria and Germany. When the deployment is completed in 2022, Coelba, for example, will have the largest Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) solution in data volume among the world's energy distributors.

"We will transform our grid´s entire operation, changing, besides the system, processes, technology and even the way we work. The project is born already following cyber security best practices with high processing capacity hyper convergent servers, a private cloud solution of last generation, aligned with our mission to distribute energy with high quality and availability", says Heron Fontana, Neoenergia's smart grids superintendent.

The asset management and GIS (Geographic Information System) systems currently used by Neoenergia will be integrated with Spectrum Power, thus allowing greater control over the operation of energy grids. The platform is capable of analyzing and controlling the load and voltage levels at all points of the grid, and, in the event of failures, promoting self-healing, i.e. automatic recomposing.

The solution will work in an integrated way with the field mobility system already used by the company – ClickSoftware – and will be able to activate the teams more efficiently, considering training and location, providing agility and refining the quality of service.

LAST GENERATION SOLUTION

SISCON´s deployment, which involves other improvements and new systems besides Spectrum Power, is unprecedented on a global scale and demands an extremely robust infrastructure. The project started in 2018 and is in the phase of development and preparation of the data center infrastructure and the distributors' operations centers. The solution will be completely implemented in the group's distributors between 2021 and 2022.

To make Spectrum Power work, the system will be implemented in two data centers at each distributor. There will also be the entire information technology network infrastructure modernization that will allow effective communication with other systems, devices and filed teams.

"Siemens believes that, in addition to allowing better management of the data generated by Neoenergia, it will contribute to a more reliable and safer energy distribution to the population," says Sérgio Jacobsen, CEO of Siemens Smart Infrastructure.

SMART GRIDS

The main advantage of Spectrum Power is that it ensures more efficient concessionaires´ operations through the use of smart grid technologies. "Having intelligence in the system for decision making ensures more availability in energy supply, the main objective of the project. At critical moments, with heavy rains and winds, the system makes all the difference for its ability to make decisions with agility and always in a structured way, even having large volumes of simultaneous occurrences", says José Luiz França, manager of real time systems and responsible for the project at Neoenergia.

Neoenergia's priority is to invest in the digitalization of grids and operations. Besides the SISCON project, another example is Future Energy, which is transforming the Atibaia region, in São Paulo. By the end of 2020, 75,000 smart meters will be installed, which will allow customers to monitor daily consumption, in addition to sensors and 140 recloser equipment, which operate with the AIR system (Smart Automation of Grids) for the self-healing.  The initiative relies on the first private 4G network in Latin America.​