REFERENCE CASE STUDY
Automated lighting is a basic part of home automation, but when the Port of Helsinki's commercial port in Vuosaari Harbor wanted an iPad to control 76 lighting towers, they turned to Hitachi Energy's MicroSCADA Pro for help.
Hitachi Energy was already in the vicinity, having installed the original light control, as well as eight substations to power the harbor when it moved from near the city center to its present location in 2008. But controlling them was beyond the original brief.
The solution
A MicroSCADA Pro system, controlled via hand-held devices, was deployed to manage the zoned lighting system, and save money for the harbor. Compared with 2008, says Vuosaari Harbour director Jukka Kallio, the addition of the controls is helping the port reduce its energy consumption for lighting by about 50 percent, translating to lower costs.
The harbor's unique lights mounted 40 feet above the area where containers and rolling goods come in and out of Helsinki, were the result of a competition.
They’re designed to minimize light pollution, which wastes power as well as annoying people living in the surrounding neighborhoods, and cast uniform light across the harbor to boost safety in a very busy area where visibility, in particular during the dark winter months, is critical.
Hitachi Energy's MicroSCADA Pro system makes lighting control from hand-held devices easy.
One step at a time
An intermediate step included adding combined zones and greater control, before the final system was implemented, providing complete control over the harbor lighting from the touch screen of an iPad.
The result: Just a single engineer, working from the field, has the power at his or her fingertips to vary the lighting to the most-appropriate intensity.
Hitachi Energy's MicroSCADA Pro system puts the control in the hands of engineers. The iPad connects using a wireless Internet system and replicates the MicroSCADA Pro interface, so the engineers, once they have signed and cleared robust security protocols, can select a specific tower or control an entire zone, changing the lighting conditions to suit the work being done.
All this means less power is wasted, and fewer staff are needed to manage the harbor lighting, letting MicroSCADA Pro shift the workload to benefit those using the harbor so they can better see what they’re doing - and the harbor itself, which saves money thanks to more-efficient lighting.
In the process, Hitachi Energy gets to show off another way that MicroSCADA Pro can improve the workplace, no matter how big, or dark, it may be.