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Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority Awards OSI a Contract to Supply Multiple SCADA Systems

OSI to provide United States Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority (WAPA) with two new large scale SCADA Systems

The project includes entirely new SCADA functionality to manage the distribution of electricity in the St. Thomas/St. John/Water Island district and the St. Croix district. The configuration will include two redundant systems located in St. Thomas and St. Croix to minimize communication failures between the islands. Both systems will be accessible from either locale during normal operating conditions.

The proposed system is based on OSI's monarch™ distributed open architecture and will include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, Historical Information Archiving, Calculation and Trending Subsystems, and Web-based Graphical User Interfaces and future functionality for Automatic Generation Control, and Distribution Management.

"We are very excited about securing this project. The WAPA project has strategic importance for OSI, as we expand our customer base in the Caribbean. We will do our best to make this an extremely successful project and a showcase reference site for the Caribbean," said Bahman Hoveida, CEO and President of OSI.

Water and Power Authority Executive Director (CEO) Alberto Bruno-Vega shares Hoveidas enthusiasm. "We are excited about the great possibilities that the new SCADA system will offer our utility as we continue to accomplish the goals set forth in our strategic plan for technical and service improvements in our operation," Bruno-Vega said.

According to Ira Bowry, WAPA's St. Croix Operations Manager and SCADA Project Management Committee Chair, the SCADA system will bring great improvement to the transmission and distribution system. "Our plant operators will be able to monitor through remote control whats happening in the field, this will help us identify where faults occur, immediately isolate problem areas and expeditiously restore service to customers," Bowry said. WAPA will expand the SCADA system into the water distribution system where the utility will be able to monitor distribution and read meters, "Ultimately, the two projects will reduce line loss in both water and electric distribution and greatly improve efficiently," Bowry concluded. The SCADA system should be operational within 18 months.

The Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority (WAPA) is a public-power utility that produces and distributes electricity and potable water to approximately 54,000 electrical customers and 12,500 potable water customers. WAPA also installs and maintains streetlights in the territory. Established in 1964 as an autonomous government agency, WAPA is considered a not-for-profit public corporation that contributes directly to the Virgin Islands Government's budget through an annual payment in lieu of taxes to the Virgin Islands Treasury.

OSI (www.osii.com) provides open, state-of-the-art, and high-performance automation solutions to electric utilities worldwide. These solutions include Energy Management Systems (EMS), Distribution Management Systems (DMS), Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Systems, and Generation Management Systems (GMS), as well as individual software products and e-business solutions for electric utility operations. OSI is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

For additional information regarding this news release please contact news@osii.com.