NEC Exhibitors get personalised power supplies

NEC Exhibitors get personalised power supplies

With 21 halls totalling 200,000 square metres (two million square feet) The National Exhibition Centre (NEC) is the biggest exhibition centre in Britain and welcomes over three million visitors a year.
Until recently, providing power to the tens of thousands of stands built every year was a complicated and labour intensive process involving thousands of metres of temporary cables being installed by an army of electricians. It was also a time consuming exercise, adding time to the build-up and breakdown of an exhibition.
All that has now changed thanks to a fully automated control system designed and installed by Gloucestershire-based Severn Controls. The system, which networks 65 Mitsubishi Q-series PACs (programmable automation controllers) over a Mitsubishi MX4 SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) package, uses 5km of cabling to connect all the exhibition halls into one integrated supply structure and incorporates an IT front end to maximise user-friendliness.
The new electrical infrastructure, called "Plug & Play", is part of The NEC's £40m venue improvement programme and represents an innovative yet technologically proven solution to exhibition stand-wiring.
Previously setting up manually could take up to two weeks and only then could carpets be laid and stand building begin. Just before the exhibition opened, the contractor re-entered the subway, put in the fuses and turned on power to the stands. The power supply then remained on for the duration of the exhibition. When the exhibition closed, contractors reversed the process and the cables were disconnected and put into storage, ready to go through the same process again for the next exhibition. Besides the significant labour costs involved, the downtime required to wire each exhibition meant that valuable exhibition time was lost.