CREOS

CREOS Luxembourg S.A. is the main electricity transmission and distribution operator in Luxembourg; it owns and runs circa 9,300km of power lines and 1,911km of natural gas pipelines, as well as nearly 245,000 electricity customers and approximately 45,000 customers connected to natural gas. CREOS employs over 650 people.

CREOS' legacy mobile voice network, which was mainly used during power failures, had become obsolete and needed to be replaced. The operator decided to develop a telecoms backbone network based on surface and underground optical fibre to connect 50 High Voltage (HV) substations to a variety of key locations.

The new network delivers operational telecoms services such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) to support the management of its infrastructure, alongside voice services providing mission-critical communications to field staff and network control rooms.

The Medium Voltage (MV) electrical grid currently consists of approximately 2,600 MV substations of which only 198 are connected to the telecoms network.

In recent years, utilisation of electrical energy has exponentially increased and customer requirements and quality definitions of power have undergone remarkable changes. As electrical energy has become an essential part of daily life, its optimal usage and reliability have also become increasingly important. Real-time network visibility and dynamic decisions have become instrumental to the optimisation of resources and energy demand management.

CREOS is facing a number of drivers for change - based on market regulation, consumer demand and changes to the electricity distribution - which will impact current and future business. These drivers led CREOS to identify the necessary steps to move towards a smart grid infrastructure and more advanced electricity demand management applications to monitor and control the electricity supply.

In particular, CREOS recognised that it will become increasingly challenging to predict and manage consumer demand.

CREOS' smart metering roll-out is expected to start in 2015 and to achieve 95% completion by 2018 (electricity) and 2020 (gas).

Smart metering will not only enable customers to reduce their energy consumption, it will also give CREOS good visibility of the low voltage grid in addition to the already complete visibility of the high voltage grid provided by the telecom backbone.

Sepura has started delivering for CREOS a complete communication solution comprising a TETRA infrastructure to cover an area of 2.586 km² and TETRA radio terminals for voice communications.

Further to thorough planning and detailed design specifications Sepura identified the requirement for a number of STP9000 hand-portables and SRG3900 mobile gateway TETRA radios which are being mainly used by the CREOS maintenance teams for voice communications.

In addition, thanks to Sepura's efficient planning, CREOS' infrastructure Factory Acceptance Tests took place in a record time of just over three months after contract signature; the infrastructure roll-out started in the beginning of 2014. The project will be completed by the end of 2022.