Utility Reduces Comm Costs by 2/3 Thanks to VTScada’s Native MQTT and Sparkplug B
Client
Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, USA
Overview
Located along Louisiana’s gulf coast, Terrebonne Parish has been a center of Cajun culture since the 18th century. Consolidated Waterworks District 1 (CWD1) provides potable water to over 42,000 residential and commercial customers across the Parish.
The Problem – The copper wire landline the utility used to communicate with their lift station network was fragile and expensive to maintain. As a result, they were only able to connect to 134 of their 230 lift stations.
The Solution – The utility had upgraded to VTScada years earlier based, in-part, on the recommendation of a neighboring Parish. In 2024, the Terrebonne SCADA Department took advantage of VTScada’s built-in edge features to replace CWD1’s landline I/O network with secure Cellular using MQTT Sparkplug B. This change from traditional polling to a publish/subscribe edge model has reduced the utility’s communications costs by two thirds and will allow them to connect the remainder of their lift stations.
Features
- Modbus Master has been moved from within VTScada to the ELPRO Technologies 641M-4 Edge Cellular Gateway which improved the update from once every 30 minutes to when the data changes (Report on Exception).
- Within the VTScada application, there is a MUX created to allow for a redundant source which is another redundant MQTT Broker pair or an unlicensed 900MHz radio.”
- A VPN connection via OpenVPN is also configured to be able to view the VTScada application from up to 5 Thin Clients on a PC, Smartphone and/or Tablet.”
Outcomes
ELPRO completed the design and provided a more secure solution that could easily scale with their needs. The most important benefit is described succinctly by Smith, “The Return on Investment of the total project reduced the monthly communications bill by two thirds.”
Network architecture at Terrebonne Parish that replaces landline communications with Cellular and using MQTT Sparkplug B for 134 lift stations.
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