Using control center technology to solve new utility challenges

Journal Article · Sat Oct 01 04:00:00 EDT 1994 · IEEE Computer Applications and Power; (United States)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/67.318915· OSTI ID:7006415

Vice, R L; Wood, J T ^[1]; Le, K D; Nguyen, M T

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1. Southern Co. Services, Inc., Birmingham, AL (United States)

With a service territory spanning Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, the Southern electric system is one of the largest investor-owned utility systems in the United States. The pool's generation consists of 6 nuclear units, 74 coal-fired units, 22 gas/oil units, 47 combustion turbines, 33 pondage-hydro plants, and 1 pumped-storage plant. To optimize this diverse fleet of resources, the System Operation department at Southern Company Services (SCS) has been using Wescouger, a resource-scheduling program developed by ABB. Originally installed on an IBM mainframe, the software package is used on a daily basis to optimally schedule thermal and hydro units, estimate future prices of power transactions, and perform post analysis. In recent months, the number of unit commitment (UC) runs to support operational-planning and post-analysis studies grew to the point that the IBM 3090 mainframe became overloaded. To solve this problem, Southern Company migrated their operational-planning software from the mainframe to a distributed client-server architecture, using Pentium PCs as clients on the front end to prepare data nd produce reports and IBM RS/6000 workstations as high-speed servers to store data and perform UC runs. This article focuses on this migration project.

• OSTI ID: 7006415
• Journal Information: IEEE Computer Applications and Power; (United States), Journal Name: IEEE Computer Applications and Power; (United States) Vol. 7:4; ISSN ICAPEH; ISSN 0895-0156
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION
240100* -- Power Systems-- (1990-)
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200 -- Mathematics & Computers
CAPACITY
DATA PROCESSING
DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
ENERGY SYSTEMS
INFORMATION SYSTEMS
PLANNING
POWER SYSTEMS
PROCESSING
RETROFITTING