Efacec Automation is pleased to announce the conclusion of the Ribeiradio hydro power plant automation project for the Portuguese company for power generation - EDP Produção. The new 83 MW Ribeiradio plant is located in the Centre of Portugal at Vouga River. The project involved the construction of a new power plant between 2010 and 2015, also with the participation of other business areas from Efacec.

The distributed control system comprises a complete solution for power plant automation based on the latest CLP 500PAS platform in a high-reliability configuration to manage the two new generator units and associated systems.

Deployed over DCU 500H and UC 500H high-availability controllers, the CLP 500PAS solution installed at Ribeiradio presents unprecedented reliability with fully redundant controllers and communication networks. Following the experience gained at previous projects such as the Alqueva II hydro power plant, is fully based on the innovative IEC 61850 standard for both field and unit buses.

This hydro power plant communicates with several remote SCADA control centres (national HPP SCADA Centre, UNGE Energy Business Dispatch, or national TSO SCADA) through IEC 60870-5-104 or IEC 60870-5-101.

The CLP 500PAS power plant automation system is a unified distributed control system platform tailored for the automation of both large and small hydro power plants. CLP 500PAS presents configurations ranging from compact systems to high availability solutions together with field-proven algorithms for unit and field automation that deliver highly efficient and reliable solutions.