Stadtwerke Flensburg GmbH

Flensburg, Germany – New integrated control room with the latest KVM technology and the merge of three control rooms based upon a unified operator control system.

Customers

Stadtwerke Flensburg is a municipal utilities enterprise headquartered on the Flensburg Harbour. The company supplies electricity, district heating, water and industrial gas. (Outputs 2015: Electricity 1498.1 Mio kWh, District Heating 928.8 Mio. kWh, Water 4.9 Mio m3)

As a public utility, Stadtwerke Flensburg supplies approximately 55,000 households and companies in the region of Flensburg, Glücksburg and Harrislee with environmentally friendly electricity produced in its own modern heat and power plant facility. The network is nuclear-free since 2012, and the city supplies electricity to an additional 145,000 customers nationwide. Furthermore, it provides 98% of all households in the region with environmentally sound district heating – one of the highest density coverages worldwide.

Challenge

As an innovative and environmentally aware energy supplier, the City of Flensburg decided to renovate and expand its thermal power station in 2011. The consolidated project, which was named ‘Kessel 12’ (Boiler 12) and consisted of various sub-projects, was completed in 2016. A new central control room was one of the sub-projects. While the city maintained three control rooms to manage the complex systems in the past, the reorganisation aimed to not only modernise the entire control technology but also consolidate the control rooms into one central facility.

Prior to the WEYTEC consolidation project, all the computers and systems were housed in central server rooms and connected to workplaces over simple point-to-point connections. But the multitude of diverse systems made it unworkable to simply merge the control rooms and continue to manage all the sources in an ergonomic and efficient manner. In addition to countless cables, there were also innumerable monitors and input devices at the desks to be taken into account in the design of a secure, ergonomic and efficient operational system.

The challenge was to create a central control room in which all systems are integrated onto a single platform. The users should be able to quickly and intuitively control any and all systems, depending on their individual authorisation levels or areas of responsibility, with a single multifunctional keyboard. One integrated video wall per business area was required to enhance visualisation. And the solution needed to be flexible enough so that employees can support and take over for each other in an emergency situation – even from another workplace.

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Case

Facts & Figures

WEYTEC distributionPLATFORM

Main control room

12 Workplaces
15 Multifunctional Keyboards MK06 (3 desks each with 2 keyboards)
>100 Sources
2x2 Video wall
2x4 Video wall

Solution

For this challenging environment, WEY Technology implemented a unified solution based upon the WEYTEC distributionPLATFORM technology. All the computers are housed in secure, decentralized server rooms, and are connected to the WEYTEC distributionPLATFORM. This eliminates the point-to-point connections and ensures the secure and latency-free switching of any system to any defined workplace. The sources can be used either individually or collectively.

Two eyevis video walls with graphic controllers have been fully integrated into the WEYTEC distributionPLATFORM and provide enhanced visualisation. All systems and sources can be controlled with a single MK06 multifunctional keyboard and displayed on any screen or video wall with the simple push of a button.

In addition to the operator stations, all the IT and engineering stations were reorganized into a separate department. Where once the programmers had to make system changes directly in a severely chilled server room, today they can comfortably access all their systems and sources, and execute changes from their modern office space.

Benefits

The City of Flensburg now benefits from a fully integrated control room that is based on cutting-edge technology. The merging of the three control rooms enhances the security of the supply of the region’s utilities. Systems are centrally monitored and controlled. Interventions are better coordinated and team members can collaborate and support each other in a modern way.

In an extensive project like Kessel 12, a multitude of situations arise during the implementation phase that require changes that were unforeseen at the time of the initial decision making. For example, the number of computers to be integrated rose continuously, which is never a problem with the IP-based solution from WEYTEC. Furthermore, the redundancy concept for the entire system safeguards against failures and helps to ensure the supply of utilities to the region. This is a great advantage of the WEYTEC solution.

Ron Christiansen
Project Manager for Plant Engineering