Project
Power Systems Control Engineering
Client
Southern California Edison
Location
Los Angeles, CA
Project Overview
Southern California Edison (SCE), one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, delivers power to 15 million customers across 50,000 square miles of southern California, Arizona and Nevada. Part of SCE’s mission is delivering reliable electricity to its customers through continuous improvement. To achieve this mission goal, the Grid Services Department has implemented multiple initiatives such as substation Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) upgrades and Real-Time Automation Controller (RTAC) expansions that support transmission, SCE-owned generation and 3rd party generation interconnection.
Layline's Role
The Layline Automation controls system engineering team was engaged to support the RTU and RTAC upgrades and expansion projects. The Layline engineering and project management team was tasked to support the Power System Controls (PSC) engineering group to provide engineering, design and management of substation RTU upgrades and the new distributed RTU project that would be monitoring both SCE and 3rd party generating sites interconnecting to SCEs grid.
Challenges
The absence of a documented process for project work intake and tracking initially posed significant challenges. To address this, the team developed and documented a comprehensive process pipeline and tracking system. Additionally, the projects arrived in waves, with design and commissioning target dates varying from months to years. To support the project management team in handling this variability, a team of reserve engineers was built out. This ensured that all projects were delivered on time, even when there was a large influx of projects simultaneously.
Solution
The engineering and project management professionals were able to execute over 400 RTU upgrade projects on time using a surge support model to ramp up engineering staff using the Layine developed project tracking method. Layline Automation team alone accounted for approximately 30% of all substation RTU engineering projects at SCE working in partnership with the PSC staff. In addition, development and delivery of a 120 page highly detailed design process document allowed for the future project passing through the PSC team would be executed with efficiency and consistency.
