Smart Grid Communications

Consumers require a continuous, reliable supply of electricity, and the need to monitor an increasingly complex grid is growing. In recent years, solar cells have become very common as a means for consumers to produce their own electricity. Any electricity surplus can be sent back to the grid and sold to other consumers. This requires the ability to monitor and control the very edge of the electricity grid. Only a few secondary substations today are connected to a control center, but having communication with primary substations alone cannot guarantee quality of service. With electricity companies having perhaps more than 100,000 secondary substations to manage from a single control centre, maintenance is usually reactive, making it harder to maintain the quality of energy supply. Considering the high number of devices to be installed, ease of configuration and maintenance is essential to ensure these projects are viable. These secondary substations can be spread over large geographical areas, without any supervision, but all connections must be secure against cyberattacks.

Westermo solution

Westermo uses cellular communication to enable customers to reach secondary substations from their control centres, having the most robust and reliable cellular routers on the market. Reliable remote access can help you to reduce the number of minutes of lost supply and the number of customer interruptions. The Merlin industrial cellular routers and Lynx switches offer the highest mean time between failures (MTBF) on the market, and its dual-SIM feature provides a redundant connection to control centres. 

Coupled with the Zero Touch deployment software Activator, it provides cost-effective, reliable, and consistent onboarding of routers in large-scale projects. To achieve best-in-class cybersecurity, the Merlin series is equipped with features such as Secure Boot, Trusted Platform Module, IPSec encryption and stateful firewall.

Key benefits

• Connect secondary substations with control centres using robust cellular communication
• Merlin industrial cellular routers feature dual SIM to offer a redundant connection to control centres
• Activator offers easy router installation and automated deployment
• Protect against attacks with features such as VPN and firewall

Activator is a telco-grade, automated provisioning and monitoring system designed to simplify the logistic issues associated with deploying and managing thousands of routers. Activator can be a cloud-based or a privately installed server.

Monitor is a secure portal built in to Activator that provides your support team with access to router availability, real-time diagnostics, and dashboard reporting. Routers that are created as devices on Activator are automatically created on Monitor. Together, Activator and Monitor provide a highly scalable management solution that grows with your service.

• Reduced cost of sending installation engineers to site
• Easy router installations
• Automated deployment
• No end-user action required
• Real-time diagnostics
• Full scheduler for bulk updates
• Simple integration with your existing systems