The City of Cedar Rapids wanted to monitor power consumption and power quality at various points throughout the Water Pollution Control Plant’s power distribution system. More than 100 power meters were installed in the main 12.47 kV utility service entrance switchgear, selected switchboards and panelboards, and in motor starters and variable frequency drives for individual process equipment loads.

City operations and engineering staff collaborated with our electrical and wastewater engineering staff to develop a list of process equipment and power distribution equipment that, if metered for power consumption, would provide valuable information to the City to evaluate process efficiency and prioritize capital improvement projects. The design team also identified key areas around the plant that warranted the monitoring of harmonic current and voltage distortion.

A dedicated programmable logic controller (PLC) was installed to centralize data collection from the new power meters using Ethernet communications, which required various improvements to the existing Ethernet network infrastructure. The existing Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system human machine interface (HMI) graphics software and historian database software was utilized to present power metering data to the City’s operations and engineering staff using spreadsheet exports, overview and detailed power metering summaries, and a configurable trending interface.

Services Provided:

• Electrical
• Information technology