Ethernet Direct Penetrates Power & Utility Electric Distribution in Latin America

Electricity distribution is the penultimate stage in the delivery of electricity to end users. This process generally includes medium-voltage power lines, electrical substations and pole mounted transformers, low-voltage distribution wiring and sometimes electricity meters. The modern distribution system begins from the primary circuit leaving the sub-station and ending as the secondary service to enter the customers’ meter socket.

In Latin America, the system is upgraded to improve the level of services to customers in the metropolitan regions, Region VI, VII, VIII and Region IX. To provide high bandwidth to the centralized management system, industrial Ethernet switches with simple management functions are installed to offer a 24x7 non-stop operation. Power utilities are turning to use industrial Ethernet due to the requirements of high reliability and high bandwidth. This project demands critical links on the entire communication network. As one of the main companies on electric distribution in Chile, optimum performance is a must and reliability is no compromise. In each sub-station, an industrial Ethernet switch will be connected with several equipments to control data. This allows Ethernet LAN to maintain high availability of electric power to the public. Another requirement in power utilities is the need of switches to operate with redundant power inputs. HWE-800 is an industrial 8-port web-managed Ethernet switch. Since it is a high performance switching device, HWE-800 provides redundant self-recovery mechanism in less than 300ms on full load which allows you to establish a redundant Ethernet network to build a back-up ring topology needed in power utilities. For power protection, HWE-800 is equipped with a terminal block to provide dual power inputs with reverse polarity protection.