Fortum – AVEVA manages hydro power stations with central remote monitoring and reporting

Finland's largest hydro power plant

The Imatra hydropower plant is Finland's largest hydropower unit, consisting of two plants: Imatrankoski 178 MW (7 units) and Tainionkoski 62 MW (4 units).

The Imatra and Tainionkoski power plants together produce over 10% of Finland's total hydropower production. The power plants are located in the Vuoksi River, which connects two of Northern Europe's largest lakes (Saimaa/Finland and Ladoga/Russia). In the same Vuoksi River, there are also large hydropower plants on the Russian side, which places its own additional requirements on the monitoring and reporting of the Imatrankoski and Tainionkoski power plants located upstream in Finland.

Key goals in the automation and reporting renovation of the power plants were:

• Guaranteed and efficient joint use and reporting of the two hydropower plants
• Combining the different automation devices used in the power plants into the same control room and reporting system at the Imatrankoski hydropower plant
• Easy and secure unmanned local automation outside working hours with a remote control solution from Fortum's central control room in Keilaniemi, Espoo
• Fast project planning and maintenance of the new system, including real-time updates.

Fortum's Imatrankoski and Tainionkoski chose AVEVA automation software as their joint automation solution.

AVEVA software connects 22 PLC systems from various manufacturers

The facilities use 22 PLC systems from several manufacturers: Rockwell Automation, Siemens, and Schneider, all of which have ready interfaces in AVEVA software.

The local AVEVA servers of Imatrankoski and Tainionkoski were connected with a fast, approximately 10-kilometer-long fiber optic cable, which was duplicated for sufficient reliability. The separate servers of the two power plants can act as duplicates of each other if necessary, significantly increasing reliability.

The power plant's automation and reporting applications were created using the AVEVA System Platform application environment, which manages connections, user interfaces, data collection, and reporting. For local operation, the network has three InTouch control room workstations and one remote control room workstation located 300 kilometers away in Fortum's central control room.

The Historian automation database of the AVEVA System Platform handles data collection, storage, and reporting, and compresses data into a small space. Furthermore, one workstation is connected to the same local network for system application development and maintenance.

Achieved Benefits

Significant improvements were achieved with the selected AVEVA System Platform automation and reporting solution compared to previous operations:

• The power system has paid special attention to fail-safe redundancy and duplication. AVEVA System Platform applications and servers used in parallel operation of the two power plants can replace and manage each other's functions if necessary.
• Fast and accurate data collection and reporting by AVEVA software automate the maintenance and service of power plants
• The operation of power plants and the use of different suppliers' automation devices and their information can be monitored in real-time with the same AVEVA software
• Flexible remote monitoring, where all local control room functions can also be managed remotely
• AVEVA software is easy to expand if necessary, and new automation and measurement solutions can be integrated
• AVEVA continuously updates and releases new software versions to match the latest Microsoft environments, ensuring new versions of automation applications and associated security solutions, among others.

The automation solution for Fortum's Imatrankoski and Tainionkoski was implemented by Comatec Automation Oy (Imatra), a certified AVEVA Partner and project house by Klinkmann.