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Fort Collins Municipality Case Study

A proposal for equipping broadband services to the Fort Collins, CO, municipality was approved by residents and a $120 million bond is now providing Fort Collins with resources to build and improve the municipality’s infrastructure so it can support broadband service for any qualifying resident. Fort Collins distributes power to its community, so building broadband services through existing right-of-way infrastructure was a viable way to provide competitively priced services to residents


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Electrical Substations

Substation Architecture Protection

Solving common mistakes in communications cabling for electrical utilities

BY FRANK KODITEK, Belden Inc.

In the energy industry, there are numerous types of cables in use for a wide variety of applications, from transporting high-voltage current for miles to providing power and data connectivity within and among substations and to and from control centers. For the purposes of this article, we will be looking at the communications cables that are the veins and arteries of the substation communications architecture. The aim is to achieve adequate substation architecture protection.

In general, the International Electrotechnical Commission’s IEC 61850: “Power Utility Automation” is the global standard for the design of electrical substation automation, and it specifies internet protocols (TCP/IP networks) and high-speed Ethernet-based substation LANs (local area networks) as the transport vehicles.

Choosing the right cable for these applications is critical to performance. As important as cabling is to effective...

Electrical Substations Articles

Physical Security & Monitoring

Deterrence Drives Next Gen Security

Theft, destruction, disablement, vandalism, and terrorism: any of the aforementioned words receive the attention of organizations with susceptible critical assets. Physical security and its costs, benefits, and risks are becoming more important as each day passes. Important, not only from a safety...
Substation Technologies

Protecting Substations Against Animal Invaders

A closer look at animal-caused outages at substations BY BILL REICHARD, TransGard Systems Every year, squirrels, raccoons, snakes, and other climbing animals cause substation outages across North America. According to a 2010 University of Minnesota study, the resulting estimated cost to electric...
Substation Automation

RTU and HMI Redundancy in Electrical Substations

As the substation RTU takes on more applications, such as Human-Machine-Interface (HMI), alarm annunciation, math & logic and “relay communication processing”, its need for high availability increases. Anything that takes the RTU out of service – configuration change, firmware update, or...