SCL power production fleet produces approximately 1800MW and provides the residence of the City of Seattle a vital critical service. NERC CIP version 3 and future version 4 compliance requirement, Harris Group was asked to assist SCL and provide a standard, modular and organized approach to automation and data flow with in the Remote Operation Center and back to their SCADA Control Center The project consists of review and providing recommendation to their network architecture at each remote operations center (Substation, Power generation facility and remote access) and back to their Seattle Municipal Tower through a fiber optic Sonet OC-12 (Future OC-48) and redundant microwave infrastructure.

Various technologies were tested for integration within the security perimeters with use with Microsoft active directory, NERC auditing/reporting, access/change management and SCADA historian infrastructure.

Key issues included:

• Aging infrastructure and work force
• Regulatory and environmental compliance
• Lack of Documentation, organization, standardization and consistency
• Need to resolve data quality, performance, and reliability problems
• Need to standardize architecture and configuration across sites for improved maintainability
• Issues that need to form the foundations are user requirements, reliability, ease of use, cyber security, regulatory compliance, computer assisted information accessibility, remote access, and intelligent alarming.