An important milestone was achieved in November with the first known in-place upgrade of a GE D20 RTU at Montana-Dakota Utilities (MDU) in Bismarck, ND.

The GE D20 is a legacy device that has been in use for many years in utilities throughout the world. Due to customer demand and based upon the success of Efacec ACS’ RTU upgrades for other manufacturers’ obsolete technology, a unique retrofit solution for the D20 was developed. The upgrade at MDU involved replacing the GE controller with the Efacec ACS NTX-220 and retrofitting the other D20 modules using the NTX-U20/D digital panel upgrade and the NTX-U20/C combination panel.

This critical RTU provides MDU with local alarms, analog data (line voltages, temperature, etc.) and emergency generator start/stop control functions in the control center. The entire upgrade process took approximately 1.5 hours, resulting in a significant cost savings and reduced downtime for the utility. The NTX-U20 upgrade only the latest in a successful portfolio developed by Efacec ACS, which includes solutions for more than 25 different models.