Institutional Centralized Metering
The University is a global leader in research and teaching with an enrollment over 90,000 on 3 campuses giving it one of the largest footprints of any university in Canada and around the world.
Business Background
The University faced a bevy of maintenance challenges related to its large, aging electrical infrastructure:
Transfer switches failing to transfer to emergency power resulting in buildings without life safety systems. More troubling still, if a transfer switch failed in the emergency position, it will stress the emergency distribution network causing emergency generators to run unexpectedly, burning fuel and potentially polluting the environment.
The University typically had to make regular, manual readings of all the old analog meters in order to support department level charge-backs.
Service upgrades and equipment additions required engineering to install a temporary data logger sometimes for several weeks to capture the load characteristics.
The older analog meters would not allow bidirectional current flow preventing the ability to track either cogeneration or solar generation being sold back to the grid.
If engineering received a building power outage call, an electrician had to be rolled to verify and perform diagnostics. In the event the building had a high voltage feed, a high voltage electrician would also have to be dispatched. More often than not it was a minor issue that was not considered to be an emergency.
The Project
The University contracted Bentley Systems Group to do a comprehensive study of the existing metering infrastructure and design/build a custom metering solution to remediate these challenges including:
Installation of power quality meters on all high voltage feeders, distribution main breakers, critical equipment and life safety transfer switches
Networking all meters to the University’s internal network, leveraging BACnet IP protocol for communications
Detection and tracking of transfer switch positions in near real-time
BSG's Custom Solution Delivered Extensive Results
Enables centralized monitoring of all meters across the entire campus in near real-time
Reduces emergency call out expense as most diagnostics can now be done remotely
Provides an accurate image of current energy consumption on every branch of distribution which can prevent accidentally overloading emergency generators
Alarm set-points can be created to immediately notify engineering of an electrical anomaly, which can decrease outage time
Provides real-time and historic data on harmonics and power factors as well as max/min demand to assist in infrastructure planning
Enables accurate utility pricing and charge-back models at building and department levels