Antagrade Electrical Ltd were engaged by Siemens AG to provide expertise in the commissioning of substations during the construction of the new Metro de Valencia in Venezuela.

Together with their professional project management skills, Antagrade’s engineers applied their electrical distribution and infrastructure expertise to support the integration of the new 750 V DC transit system. Engineering services were provided to the traction substation power conversion equipment and auxiliary control and protection systems.

Antagrade played a key role in helping to coordinate the design and installation works, developed test plans and carried out commissioning testing for all the major components including high voltage switchboards, traction transformers, rectifiers, DC circuit breakers and their interfaces to the SCADA and control equipment.

Live testing included section proving, operation of the system’s standby generators and short circuit testing to demonstrate capability under fault conditions.

The 6.3km Line 1 has seven stations and an initial capacity of 8 000 passengers per hour per direction with trains planned to run every 4 minutes. The metro has been in service since March 2007.