June 2016, it was marked with a major turning point in the supervision and control of the operation of the power system and electricity market in Vietnam. That's when the SCADA/EMS system newly invested by the Electricity of Vietnam (the supplier is OSI - USA) was put into operation. Currently, the National Load Dispatch Center serves the dispatching of the national power system with nearly 300 power plants at approximately 400 units, more than 170 220 - 500kV transformer stations with over 400 transformers collected in full data. At the control room, the dispatchers can monitor and capture the changes of each generating unit, transformer, line, etc., thereby giving fast - accurate - timely dispatching orders.
Modern dispatch room at A0 (photo taken in 2019) - Photo: Thanh Trung.
Not only effectively exploiting the SCADA/EMS-equipped system, EVNNLDC also regularly researches, creates and improves tools running on the SCADA/EMS system, in order to increase automation according to the development trend of Industrial Revolution 4.0, digital technology; at the same time, increasing efficiency in monitoring and dispatching power system in real time, meeting new and increasing requirements in power system dispatching with many current challenges.
Specifically, EVNNLDC has introduced many effective applications in the dispatch and operation of the power system such as: automatic generation control (OpenAGC), EMS application to calculate the power grid (OpenNet), Operator Training Simulator (OpenOTS).
In particular, OpenAGC with the capacity to perform automatic control of generating units in different modes is a particularly important application, helping dispatchers not only reduce their workload but also perform quickly and accurately automatically dispatching orders, especially in the context of repid and strong development of renewable energy sources.
With the increasingly large system scale, as well as the instability of renewable energy power plants, the traditional frequency regulation using a hydropower power plant (Hoa Binh, Son La) does not guarantee security for electrical system. The use of OpenAGC to automatically adjust frequency through multiple units will ensure the speed of increasing and decreasing the load, as well as the amount of backup capacity for frequency regulation. OpenAGC also ensures the mobilization, or reduction of energy sources, ensuring openness and transparency. Up to now, 240 power plants (including hydropower, coal-fired power, oil-fired thermopower, gas-fired turbine, renewable energy) have successfully connected AGC, in which most of the renewable energy plants are all connected.
In addition, EVNNLDC has developedbackup control rooms in all the 3 regions of the country, so as to ensure that the power system always operates safely and stably in all situations.
In the digital transformation of Vietnam Electricity in general, the National Load Dispatch Center has also promoted digitization in all areas of activity such as: application of AI and Big Data in forecastingloads, as well as handling cases of lack/interference of SCADA data as input for load forecasting systems, renewable energy source operation monitoring systems; promoting electronic office, and deploying intelligent business reporting system (BI).
The National Load Dispatch Center is to strive to basically become an enterprise operating under the digital enterprise model by 2025.