SCADA – This acronym has
been the heartbeat of the power industry before the ‘smart grid’ came into
picture. Now, SCADA has become legacy concept. The new technologies are finding
ways to interface with legacy SCADA to extract as much information as they can
to know more about the functioning and performance of the target plant.
If you treat SCADA as a rudimentary system, it has to be beefed
up in the following areas to convert it in to a smart grid: Data communication,
intelligent alarm management, data volume, communication protocols,
virtualization, etc.
However, SCADA can be used to manage plants, which run on both
renewable and non-renewable resources. Based on your requirement, either you
can combine or separate SCADA system for transmission and distribution. Although
it allows one to operate it remotely, the problem with SCADA is that from
security point of view when interfaced with Net, it can be easily hack able.
Across the world, process control systems for industrial
processes are sold in two flavors: SCADA/PLC & DCS.
In a SCADA/PLC system, it the PLC [Programmable Logic
Controllers] which is actually controlling the plant; SCADA provides the human
interface. The modern DCS [Distributed Control System] is quite advanced
compared to SCADA/PLC system since the former has both the plant control and
human interfacing combined in one system.
In summary, if efficiency is the point of discussion, then
DCS outshines SCADA/PLC in so many ways.
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