Abstract
This research is driven by the largest change ever in electrical power generation business for the whole county of Placer within 50years of its operations. Placer County Water Agency (PCWA) is the Government agency that generates, processes and distributes both Water and Electrical Power within Placer County in California. For the last 50 years, PCWA has been selling the generated electrical power to Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and then PG&E resells it to the California power grid. The great majority of the house-holds get water from the agency’s water treatment and distribution plants all over Placer County. They also get the electrical power generated by PCWA from the power grid via PG&E. The current 50-year contract with PG&E expires in 2013 and Placer County Water Agency is planning to get on its own and sell electrical power directly to the power grid without having to pay PG&E as the middle-man. That will save the agency and the people of Placer County millions of dollars in revenue every year which will eventually benefit the county itself as a whole. In order for the agency to be able to operate on its own, the major factor is having a reliable, secure and effective SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system with Remote Intelligent Gateway (RIGs) and other networking structures that allow operators to monitor, control and operate Electrical Power Plants throughout Placer County. This research is on the design and development of a system that would make the daily operation/generation most effective in dealing with power generation & distribution, California ISO (CAISO) reporting, accurate revenue billing, efficient data archiving and so on, so that the agency could operate on its own without having to depend on PG&E or any other third party. Intensive work has been required on researching all the factors that impact SCADA reliability, data accuracy, real-time efficiency, network security and everything else as a whole.