The Encina Wastewater Authority (EWA) is a public agency located in Carlsbad, California. EWA provides wastewater treatment services to more than 400,000 residents in northwestern San Diego County. EWA’s facilities and services are essential for protecting the local ocean environment, preserving public health, and providing recycled water resources for the region. Enterprise Automation has provided sole-sourced automation and integration services to EWA since 2017 as part of a five-year professional services agreement.
The Authority’s original SCADA system consisted of four separate HMIs that were originally installed in the 1990s. Over the course of nearly 20 years, they were updated on a piecemeal basis with limited investment in standards and consistency with design, development, or testing. EA’s first project as their on-call systems integrator was to complete a SCADA evaluation to help the Authority select a new SCADA platform that was scalable, easy to maintain, and met their specific needs.
The evaluation process started by developing a prospective list of several PLC and HMI platform combinations. Engineers sourced options based on vendor preferences from EWA staff, existing products used on site, and products that EA had significant experience with. EA evaluated platforms based on three criteria: hardware and software costs (both initial and recurring), integration costs (both initial and recurring), and system performance and risk management features. All options were tailored to EWA’s needs through hours of joint workshops and investigations.
EA leveraged decades of experience to evaluate each product’s real-world capabilities, not just marketing literature, which the Authority found invaluable. The rank-ordered results were presented to EWA, who chose Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Hybrid DCS system.
