IndigoVision's IP Video technology is providing remote monitoring for Verbund Group hydroelectric power plants along the River Danube in Austria. Verbund is the largest power generation company in Austria and derives over 90% of its generating capacity from renewable hydropower. Previously all power plants and facilities were monitored by local analogue CCTV systems with continuously manned control rooms. Within 5-6 years Verbund plans to convert all 88 hydroelectric power plants and over 40 transformer stations to centrally monitored facilities using an IP Video infrastructure supplied by IndigoVision.
This innovative IP Video solution was designed by IndigoVision's local partner C&C Salzgeber GmbH, and currently encompasses 3 of the 9 hydro plants along the River Danube network. The central command centre for the Danube network is located at the Vienna Freudenau plant and is connected to the other plants via a 2Mbit WAN with transmission distances of between 30 and 300Km.
"The key to the success of this project is the ability to transmit high quality video images over large distances with minimum bandwidth requirements," says Ing. Juhani-Michael Haider, Project Technician at Verbund. "IndigoVision's technology is field-proven and easily met the criteria. It has also provided us with a system that can be simply scaled up when new plants are added in the future."
‘Control Center', IndigoVision's enterprise video and alarm management software is used at the central command centre to provide a fully redundant backup to Verbund's existing plant monitoring system. ‘Control Center' is at the heart of IndigoVision's complete end-to-end IP Video solution and allows staff to view live video from any of the cameras, at any of the plants. Even though the video from each plant is currently not recorded, IndigoVision's Networked Video Recorders (NVRs) can be added to any point on the network to provided fault-tolerant and secure recording.
The existing analogue cameras at each plant are connected to IndigoVision transmitter/receiver modules, in the form of racks or individual 8000 units. These modules convert the camera signal to DVD quality, high-resolution digital video for transmission over the network. IndigoVision's advanced compression technology ensures that the Command Centre staff can view CCTV images that are indistinguishable from analogue while minimising network bandwidth. There are typically about 10 analogue cameras at each plant that are connected onto the network.
