IEM Canada and U.S. Developing New Switchgear in Parallel

It’s a typical business day at IEM headquarters in Fremont, CA. An RFQ has come in from the VA hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada. They’d like to upgrade a complex redundant power distribution system and will need new parallel switchgear to control the operation.

A copy of the RFQ is forwarded to IEM’s office in Western Canada where a dedicated engineering group specializes in parallel switchgear design and deployment. Utilities rarely have the same interconnection standards, so IEM Canada will be doing some research and huddling with the equipment design team at HQ to develop a specific solution that accounts for protocols, job site restrictions, and control requirements. IEM’s custom manufacturing process allows for an unlimited variety of design options for controls and mechanical construction with consideration for bus bar types, clearances, location of components, and dimensions of enclosures, so systems can be designed with generator priority controls, PC or PLC operator interfaces, remote communications capabilities and a variety of transition schemes for utility paralleling.

Once a design solution has been determined, the IEM US/Canada team works together to respond to the RFQ. HQ prices out the electrical switchgear without the controls – bus, steel, breakers, protective relays, digital metering – and Canada adds the control side – Programmable Logic Control (PLC), Human Man Interface (HMI), Factory Acceptance Test, and site start-up costs. A Submittal is offered that includes physical drawings, electrical designs, hardware selection, wiring, programming requirements, and a proposed sequence of operations.

The VA Hospital in Las Vegas is powered by six 2MW generators with provisions for three more for a total of 18MW of paralleled generators plus a 2MW Diesel Standby Power Plant as back-up.

The solution calls for 2000 Amp, 15kV, 500 MVA Nema-1 Metal Clad Paralleling Switchgear with Dual Redundant 15” Color Touch Screen Operator Interface Terminals, Generator Time Delays, and Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) programming/monitoring that controls up to 60 remote systems while displaying both ATS and Generator status. Controls include an Allen Bradley Contrologix PLC, with Ethernet Communications to HMI’s and the Building Automation System. Fiber optics with Flex I/O from Allen Bradley are required for communications to 12 Nema-1 Wall-mount ATS Control and Monitoring Systems. The set-up will include 6 generator sections with provisions for 3 more, 8 feeder breakers with provisions for expansion, Schweitzer Protective Relays and GE PowerVac Breakers.

After the release of the equipment designs to production, IEM HQ converts the schematic diagrams and begins the manufacturing process. IEM Canada purchases all the control hardware, programs and tests, then travels to IEM HQ (with the hardware) to test the control systems on the new switchgear with the client present.

When the new switchgear arrives on the client site, IEM engineers from HQ and Canada are there to oversee site start-up and commissioning, including equipment installation, test of control systems and interface with the local utility. It’s a cooperative process where various steps are executed in parallel to hasten delivery and allow for hyper-testing. The end result here will be a paralleling switchgear set-up that will optimize power utilization, control and reliability in a critical healthcare application. They say, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, and this new power distribution system will remain in Vegas, working hard for the VA Hospital for years to come. IEM has consistently delivered solutions like this in a variety of industries and locations over the past 60 years.