Digital Substation

Digital Substation is an engineering publication focused on IEC 61850 automation, protection systems, and digital grid intelligence.

Latest Articles

Latest engineering publications on IEC 61850, digital substations, PRP/HSR, and IEEE 1588 (PTPv2).

FITNESS Pilot: Are You Fit For The Future?

Future Intelligent Transmission Network SubStation (FITNESS) is the pilot live multi-vendor digital substation demonstration in GB. The project was successfully awarded under RIIO NIC, Ofgem, in late 2015 and detailed design work began in 2016.

Extensions for IEC 61850 System Configuration Language to describe HMIs have been proposed

IEC TC 57 has published (57/1767/NP) a proposal for extending the System Configuration Language (SCL) to provide high-level direction in terms of how best to bind the HMI graphical objects with the IEC 61850 data objects/attributes using the configuration description language defined in IEC 61850-6. The concept willl be based upon the existing System Configuration Language (SCL) defined in IEC 61850-6, in addition to possibly incorporating other non-IEC namespaces such as the W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) namespace.

Guidelines to redundancy systems are to be developed within IEC 61850

IEC TC 57 has proposed a new part for IEC 61850 (57/1766/DC): IEC TR 61850-90-20 - Communication networks and systems for power utility automation – Part 90-20: Guideline to redundancy systems. As more application domains are added to the IEC 61850, additional modelling, description and functional capabilities needs to be added to the “core” of IEC 61850. And one of such capabilities is redundancy.

Machine-processable Format of IEC 61850 Data Models

IEC TC 57 proposes a new work item (57/1768/NP) IEC 61850-7-7: Communication networks and systems for power utility automation – Part 7-7: Basic communication structure – Machine-processable format of IEC 61850-related data models for tools (proposed 61850-7-7). Closing date for voting: 2016-11-25.

Network infrastructure in digital substations

A local area network is critical infrastructure in a digital substation. Experts in the area of relay protection and automatic as well as automated process control systems run into it with increasing frequency, while the number of questions such as, ‘How to design it?’, ‘How to maintain it?’, ‘How to evaluate its security and effectiveness?’ only increases.

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