TANZANIA Electric Supply Company (TANESCO) will next year begin using a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, which will improve situation awareness and enable fast and reliable decision-making.
The system will enable technicians allocate technical faults caused by power cuts and attend to them as soon as they occur. It will be installed and work with s GPS system to simply manage the operations.
SCADA usually refers to centralised systems that monitor and control entire sites or complexes of systems spread out over large areas, anything from an industrial plant to a nation.
The system is a computer-based software package. Data is collected from the electrical distribution system, with most of the data originating at substations.
Depending on its size and complexity, a substation will have a varying number of controllers and operator interface points.
SCADA-enabled switches and line recloses assist operators isolate an outage and open adjacent automatic switches to reroute power quickly to unaffected sections, all without the need for a line worker to visit the site to perform a lengthy visual inspection, often followed by an educated guess as to the exact nature and location of the problem.
TANESCO's Managing Director, Eng. Felchesmi Mramba, said yesterday in Dar es Salaam while launching new system that will enable customers using post paid meters to pay their bills through mobile phone, point of sales and bank.
"The system will be installed at Mikocheni area and we expect that by April, next year everything will be ready, it is one of the most cost-effective solutions for improving reliability, increasing utilisation and cutting costs," said Eng. Mramba.
Eng. Mramba further said that the system will provide many advantages including improved worker safety, greater customer satisfaction and improved utilisation.
Their alarms and real-time views into operations can prevent small problems from becoming big ones and can also speed restoration time.
TANESCO's Senior Manager, Information Communication Technology (ICT), Mr Kusenha Mazengo, said that the launched system is safer and will help customers to reduce costs and other disturbances of visiting their offices every month to pay their bills.
Mr Mazengo said that the new system is currently available to residents of Magomeni and Kimara.
"The company is going through major changes especially in ICT area, as we have been able to start registering our customers online unlike the previous years, in which we were using manual work," he said.
