Keeping critical water infrastructure online in the Riverland

Ten Riverland townships in South Australia receive their water supply from local water treatment plants (WTPs) managed by SA Water. The WTPs take water from the Murray River and process it into safe drinking water, which is done at such high quality that it has previously been voted the best-tasting tap water in South Australia by the Water Industry Operators Association of Australia (WIOA).

The aging control systems at these sites were running at capacity and didn’t meet the standards of the organisation. This meant they were becoming increasingly hard to support and needed an upgrade. SA Water needed to ensure this critical infrastructure was aligned with its SCADA and cybersecurity standards, as well as providing the resources to grow over the next 10–15 years. Most importantly, the plants needed to be able to continuously supply high-quality water throughout any upgrade process.

SA Water engaged SAGE Automation to replace 28 PLCs and 10 SCADA systems across all of these sites over a period of 2–3 years. This allowed technologies and architectures to be used that are now helping to reshape the way the organisation implements control systems.

Through an early contractor involvement (ECI) process, SAGE was able to lead the design process with a core group of SA Water stakeholders. A highly functional group of experts from across the organisation and the industry worked together to solve issues as they arose, using the best available technology. The resulting solution provided a number of technological firsts for the business.

As part of the solution SAGE Automation implemented what was claimed to be the world’s first installation of GE’s latest CPE115 PLC at the time, providing 15 times the memory and 10 times the speed of the PLCs being replaced. The project implemented 28 of the new PLCs and was said to be the first site in the world to use the PLC in a production environment. The features of this PLC allowed the field I/O to be retained, reducing overall project risk and ensuring the shortest possible cutover time.

The ECI process allowed SAGE to prototype and implement a number of new technologies that had not been used by SA Water for control systems before. This has been used as a base for a change in how the SCADA platform is considered across the whole business. This included an upgrade to iFIX SCADA v5.9, implemented on a virtual server architecture with thin-client interfaces. Remote access was achieved via fixed wireless nbn and 4G infrastructure.

Because the infrastructure provides the community with its only water supply, it was highly critical that the hardware upgrade was quick and seamless.

“Some sites have less than a day of reserve storage, so we needed to change over the new system quickly or risk the town running out of water,” said SAGE Senior Systems Engineer Mark Dankiw. “Using the GE PLC hardware, a well-trained team and a detailed plan, we were able to perform the total changeover to the new system in less than five hours.”

The site upgrades have enabled SA Water to secure future water reliability for its regional customers and increase process efficiency within the plant.

The solution now gives SA Water the ability to control multiple sites simultaneously, increased accuracy in trending and reporting, active cybersecurity monitoring and protection, and redundancy of communications.