A 44 MW unattended run-of-river station, and the project in the program where the right engineering call is often to deliberately stay out of the control loop.
The project brief: four Kaplan units, remotely dispatched and monitored from a regional control center with no full-time on-site operator. This module covers the automation and controls side of the plant specifically — unit sequencing, the automation system's interfaces to the governor and excitation systems (both of which remain their own dedicated equipment), plant SCADA and remote monitoring architecture, and how the automation system interfaces to, without duplicating, the independently-operating protection system.
This module walks the whole project the way a real hydro controls engineer would: per-unit control panel sequencing logic, a worked hydro power output calculation used as a live instrumentation and mechanical-condition sanity check, the governor and excitation interface architecture, SCADA and remote monitoring design at roughly 2,200 tags, IEC 61850 MMS and GOOSE protection interfaces, and the dual-fiber-ring/WAN-failover communications redundancy that makes unattended operation viable at all. The full worked numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.