Future-Proofing SCADA with Ignition & Bedrock Automation
This coming Wednesday (9/21/16), Dee Brown will speak in Folsom, California at next week’s sold-out Ignition Community Conference (ICC’16), hosted by Inductive Automation (IA). He’ll discuss how Brown Engineers, a Certified Premier Integrator for IA, used Ignition’s incredibly versatile SCADA HMI software and Bedrock Automation’s ultra-secure PLC’s to help Clarksville Lig
ht & Water (CLW) future-proof its utility systems.
Clarksville, Arkansas is a small but forward-thinking town with a big vision, as demonstrated by CLW General Manager John Lester, who worked with Brown to leverage the utility’s electrical division SCADA upgrade by installing 16.7 miles of 288-strand fiber optic in redundant loops citywide. This allows CLW to readily extend its new SCADA system’s functionality and efficiency into other departments and operations as the utility desires.
“Now that the foundation is in place, the long-term plan is to automate circuit switching, monitor and load-balance on the the local grid, as well as leverage the technology to do demand-side management,” says Lester. “We expect to realize improved overall reliability, shortened response times, and reduced overall power supply costs.”
This fiber network, completed in 2016, accommodates onsite and remote monitoring, controls and data collection for water, wastewater and electrical operation. But that’s not all. Lester directed Brown to design the fiber network with enough capacity to also support police/fire 911, education, healthcare and local industry usage. The fiber optic loop even allows CLW to provide locally owned and operated high speed internet access in the future.
CLW’s SCADA architecture, built on Ignition’s SCADA HMI software platform and Bedrock Automation’s cyber-secure hardware platform, is ultra-efficient, versatile and delivers an unprecedented new layer of cybersecurity, embedded right into its PLC’s.
” A lot of utility managers are trying to understand what in the world they’re supposed to do about cyber threats. Bedrock Automation embeds authentication right in the hardware layer: the most hardened and easily implemented solution we’ve seen.” Dee Brown, PE
