THE BUSINESS SCENE

A Kingdom's Promise

Improving Jordan's electricity transmission grid
Anthony Tisot

 
©Digital Vision
Whether producing and delivering power in North America or around the world, many utilities are finding the key to staying profitable in today's competitive energy market is the ability to acquire and process information faster and more efficiently than ever before. This is especially true in deregulated markets, where the success of independent generation, transmission, and distribution companies hinges upon the timely and reliable exchange of accurate transaction and billing data between partners.

In the Middle East, where the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is upgrading and restructuring the country's electricity transmission grid, Jordan's National Electric Power Company (NEPCO) has constructed a synchronized, countrywide enterprise energy management network to provide energy companies with independent access to metering data from shared intertie points across the grid. This advanced energy monitoring and communications infrastructure is expected to play a key role in helping to support business processes between market participants while providing the tools to maintain a secure and reliable source of affordable energy for the country's 5 million residents.

Creating a Sustainable Energy Sector

Located in the heart of the Middle East, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a country in the midst of some very big changes. Limited access to natural resources such as water and oil have traditionally placed significant constraints on the region, but for decades, Jordan has faced these challenges with a steady commitment to increasing growth and improving living standards. This initiative has grown into a countrywide goal to upgrade and, most recently, deregulate the region's electricity transmission grid.

To accomplish this significant undertaking, the government of Jordan recently split the state-owned NEPCO into three distinct organizations and embarked on the next challenge: building a countrywide energy-information infrastructure to monitor energy transactions and billing between the newly independent power generation, transmission, and distribution companies. This represents a critical step towards Jordan's goal of creating a sustainable energy sector, characterized by efficiency, quality, and growth.

Jordan's Commitment to Quality

The promise to improve Jordan's energy infrastructure dates back to 1967, when the government established the Jordan Electricity Authority (JEA). The JEA was entrusted with developing a system of modern power plants and a reliable high-voltage network that would deliver electricity to every village and rural community in the country. Once established, the JEA saw Jordan's installed capacity grow steadily to meet demand and provide sufficient reserve. By the early 1990s, nearly 100% of Jordan's population was supplied with electricity. By this time, however, falling oil prices had presented a new challenge to the national economy by reducing Jordan's levels of trade with oil-producing Arab countries. Faced with a faltering economy, Jordan looked for new ways to spur growth.

In 1992, the country introduced an aggressive reform program intended to promote economic growth through the development of a market-based system. For the power sector, this meant increasing the involvement of private concerns to help create a sustainable business and regulatory environment that would encourage investment and competition. In 1996, JEA was recast as NEPCO, a publicly held government entity. Then in 1999, the Cabinet split the state-owned NEPCO into three legally and financially independent operating companies: the Central Electricity Generation Company (CEGCO), NEPCO, and the Electricity Distribution Company (EDCO).

Privatizing the Energy Sector

As a state-owned utility, NEPCO remains at the center of Jordan's restructured energy sector, responsible for the management, operation, and development of the country's high-voltage transmission network. NEPCO maintains ownership of Jordan's transmission assets but buys power from generation companies such as CEGCO and sells it to distributors such as EDCO. Eventually, CEGCO and EDCO will be privatized, but NEPCO is expected to remain a state-owned monopoly to manage transmission and load-dispatching services across the country. By splitting the country's energy assets into independent businesses, Jordan effectively divided the responsibilities into two parts, with policymaking and supervision on one side and operation management on the other.

Most of Jordan's generation is provided by two main power plants: the 650-MW Aqaba power plant in the south and the 400-MW Hussein power plant in the north. The country's transmission system runs along the north-south axis of Jordan, with distribution lines served from this 132-kV radial system. In addition to EDCO, other private firms providing distribution services include the Jordan Electric Power Company (JEPCO) in Amman and the Irbid District Electricity Company (IDECO).

To further support the business processes of an expanding energy market, each of the newly independent companies needed a way to efficiently and accurately communicate and verify energy and financial transactions. Everything—from the quantity and quality of power produced and delivered to up-to-the-minute billing and time-of-use data—had to be available to all market participants. As the administrator of this developing marketplace, NEPCO began evaluating ways to monitor metering points across the grid (every intertie where electricity is transferred from one business to another).

The first priority was to monitor settlement billing between NEPCO's transmission system and the generation assets of CEGCO. To do this, NEPCO installed an ION enterprise energy management system from Power Measurement of Victoria, Canada. The Internet-based system uses a network of 150 ION 7500 intelligent energy meters linked to four software servers to track and verify energy transactions between Jordan's generation and transmission companies.

Enterprise Energy Management Over Parallel Networks

According to Faten Khuraishi, project manager for NEPCO, a key requirement of this system was to create a parallel communications structure that could provide each company with independent access to metering data from each shared intertie point. "Instead of NEPCO providing information to CEGCO, we wanted to give each company its own direct, independent access to metering information from each feed," explains Khuraishi. "But to verify the consistency and accuracy of the metered data, we also needed to build in a network of redundant meters—a parallel network—to act as a check to the main meters."

To do this, NEPCO equipped eight of its substations with a pair of revenue-accurate ION 7500 meters on each feed: one main meter and one check meter. These meters monitor the electricity delivered from CEGCO to NEPCO and send the data up to a pair of ION RTU data loggers. Each substation is equipped with two data loggers: a main data logger receives data from all main meters in the station, and a check data logger receives data from all check meters in the station.

To oversee the data loggers, a pair of servers (a main server and a check server) was installed at each company's headquarters and configured to receive information from all metering points. Each main server monitors all main data loggers, and each check server monitors all check data loggers. Both servers are equipped with identical energy management and billing software, and both servers collect revenue and event information from the meters on the main feeds. With this arrangement, CEGCO and NEPCO maintain two completely identical yet independent metering networks, accessible from each company's corporate headquarters (see Figure 1).

To supplement the main and check servers located at each headquarters, NEPCO installed additional workstation terminals at each substation so CEGCO and NEPCO engineers could access the system locally for onsite troubleshooting or research. Security safeguards such as a segmented network infrastructure, data validation, and multilevel user authentication ensure all billing and operational data are secure—accessible only to authorized users at each organization.

NEPCO's metering system uses high-quality Rittal electrical cabinets, equipped with humidity and temperature controls, to accommodate up to six meters each. The meters and servers communicate over NEPCO's existing fiber-optic network, a dedicated Ethernet wide-area network (WAN). In remote areas, substations can connect to the Ethernet network via modem over the public telephone network. Every meter is also equipped with a built-in global positioning satellite (GPS) time-sync capability to ensure the accuracy and consistency of all time-sensitive data across the entire network.

High-Accuracy Metering

In selecting an energy management system, NEPCO identified revenue accuracy as a key requirement. The high accuracy of the meters ensures that energy can be measured against the highest revenue-metering standards, such as IEC 60687, Class 0.2S. Also, each meter can help evaluate factors such as active and reactive energy and voltage and current levels and also power-quality concerns like sags and swells and harmonics. Because both companies share the same meters at the same time, there's no variation in the data, and with every meter in the network synchronized to the millisecond using a standard GPS signal, time-of-use data is absolutely accurate. Overall, this arrangement provides shared monitoring, reporting, and billing capabilities needed to help accommodate the needs of this growing market.

As part of Jordan's efforts to attract private investment to the country's developing energy sector, a reliable metering and communications infrastructure is helping to support the business processes between market participants. Through the adoption of a synchronized, countrywide enterprise energy management system, NEPCO has set the stage for a competitive, financially viable environment for the production and sale of electricity.

For Further Reading

Power Measurement [Online]. Available: http://www.pwrm.com

Biography

Anthony Tisot is a professional writer and communications manager with Power Measurement (a division of Schneider Electric). Specializing in energy management and control technology, his background includes more than 12 years of documenting technological innovation within the public and private sectors.