Energy and Utility Industry

Global energy demand is rising with a significant amount each year. Over the next three decade, the world energy consumption is projected to grow by 56% between 2010 and 2040. This propels strong energy producers to embark on extensive exploration and production activities to meet increasing demand. Meantime, discovering innovative and efficient ways to fuel the critical processes of our infrastructures, facilities and businesses is essential to preserve natural resources and allows us to successfully distribute every portion of the usable energy with minimal loss.

Driven by innovation, environmental sustainability, and customer and employee satisfaction, most energy companies utilize a dedicated communication system for higher operational safety, greater productivity and guaranteed access. With responsibilities to provide vital and uninterrupted services to the customers, energy companies require a communication system that ensures efficient operations and superior reliability. Rancent is committed to providing high-performance and quality communication, data transmission and connectivity devices for these processes.

For over past fifteen years, Rancent has been offering industrial Ethernet products designed with high safety, reliability and durability for most harsh and hazardous applications of energy and utility industries including electric power, oil & gas, marine, mining, wind power and more. Rancent industrial hardened analog and digital copper to fiber audio/data equipment provides isolation from environmental and outside disturbances in environments ranging from -40oC ~ 80oC. These features ensure the products to withstand harsh environmental conditions such as extreme temperature ranges as well as lightning strikes, Ground Potential Rise (GPR) events and power surges.

Typical applications for energy and utility industries include:

Electric Power

Reliability is the critical successful factor to monitor the remote electric power network that carries electricity from the plants where it is generated to the users and includes substations, transformers, switches and many other devices. In addition to redundant network systems with failover capability, the network equipment must comply with industrial standards to certify an ability to operate in environments with varying temperatures, corrosion, and vibration.

Meanwhile, any copper telecommunication lines utilized in high voltage environments would risk catastrophic failures due to a GPR event, endangering personnel, equipment and critical power or communication lines. It is for this reason that all-dielectric fiber optic cables have been widely applied to replace conductive copper telephone cables in high voltage area to ensure personnel safety and reliability of critical equipment. Rancent fiber optic transmission solutions provide high voltage isolation by converting electrical (copper-based) signals into optical (fiber-based) signals to protect the network from any potential damage and destruction caused by lightning strikes, power surges and Ground Potential Rise (GPR) events.

Rancent industrial-grade managed Ethernet switches are integrated into these applications to extend copper infrastructures over fiber to provide electricity supply monitoring, switching and control between electrical substations and central stations. With high and low voltage AC/DC power supplies and meeting emission, immunity and safety approvals associated with substation equipments, Rancent industrial Ethernet switches are ideal network communication options designed to meet the specific environmental specification standards associated with power substations.

Wind Energy

Wind farms are usually located in harsh environments with extreme temperatures (for example, offshore temperatures may fall below -10°C), or excessive dust, corrosion and vibration. Communication between wind turbine towers is also a major issue since wind farms generally span vast distances where the wind power can be harvested without physical interruptions such as buildings. And due to the sheer height of wind turbines, they are also prone to lightning, GPR and electrical events that result in catastrophic turbine damage and outage. Networking and communications products used in these applications require industrial-grade durability in order to withstand such conditions.

Rancent Industrial Temperature 100/1000M Media Converters and 10/100/1000Base-T to Gigabit SFP 5-port /6-port Ethernet Switches are commonly applied to ensure data communication, real-time monitoring and control over wind turbine towers, substations and central stations. These communication devices have superior dielectric properties and are immune to GPR events and temperature extremes that could interfere with communication, monitoring and control of the wind farm and its control facility.