Umeå Energi produces, distributes and sells electricity, district heating and district cooling to a total of approximately 56,000 customers, most of whom are in the Umeå municipality in northern Sweden. One of their power stations, located on the River Sävarån, is a combined power and heating generation plant that uses municipal waste as their energy source. At this plant, Umeå Energi needed to implement a Continuous Emissions Monitoring System (CEMS) to monitor their stack emissions. Based on their industrial experience, Candeo Nordkonsult AB was selected as contractor for the CEMS job.
Ulrik Jarno was the project leader for Candeo, while Ulf Kullh represented Umeå Energi. Both Jarno and Kullh worked closely to develop the required CEMS calculations. "The CEMS calculations were rather intensive, requiring data from over 250 points at one second intervals from three ABB AC450 (Advant Controller) machines," said Jarno. "We selected the Matrikon OPC Server for ABB AC450 (using the GCOM protocol), because of its high throughput capabilities and the fact that it could connect to all three controllers simultaneously."
"We asked Matrikon come to our plant to help us with the implementation of the OPC Server" said Kullh. "While we had a lot of in-house expertise to configure the ABB AC450, we did not know the internals very well." With Matrikon's on-site help, a complete tag import was automated and verified, and the OPC server was online in only a few days.
A couple of months after the implementation was complete, the OPC server stopped functioning as expected. "Because of their on-site visit, Matrikon was able to troubleshoot the system remotely," said Kullh. Routine network maintenance by plant personnel mistakenly made a change to the netw