With 21 halls totalling 200,000 sq m, the NEC is the biggest exhibition centre in Britain. 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.
All that has now changed thanks to a fully automated control system designed and installed by Severn Controls. The system, which networks 65 Mitsubishi Q-series PACs (programmable automation controllers) over a Mitsubishi MX4 Scada 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.