Back on writing Blog postings

You may have wondered that I haven’t posted information on this blog for some three weeks. The reason simply was this: I was traveling internationally conducting comprehensive seminars and hands-on trainings in Harare (Zimbabwe; attendees from 10 Southern African countries!!), near Birmingham (UK), near Zurich (Switzerland), and presenting IEC 61850 at a fair in Darmstadt (Germany).

And now getting prepared for the next training in Frankfurt (Germany) mid of next week. See next post.

Hope to see a few people of the readers there.

Final Call for IEC 61850 Seminar and Hands-on Training in Frankfurt on May 04-06, 2011

There are a few seats left for the upcoming 3 day IEC 61850/61400-25 Seminar/Hands-on Training (NettedAutomation):

Frankfurt (Germany)

04.-06. May 2011

Click HERE for the program and registration information.

I allow a discount for the remaining seats!!

Please contact us as soon as possible to get one of the few remaining seats.

Click HERE to send an email to get a special offer.

Process and Factory Automation – And Electric Power Automation?

The Process and Factory/Manufacturing Automation domain is quite well developed since the nineties. Many communication solutions and standards have been developed since the MAP days in the eighties. The Automation of Electric Power Systems has been progressed independently of most other domain – maybe because of the fear of the danger of the high voltage!?

Usually there is very little exchange of information between the domain of Electric Power Automation and other areas. Also in the standardization world there is very little cooperation between these domains … with a few exceptions: IEC 60870-6 TASE.2 and IEC 61850 (standards for Power Systems) are using a Manufacturing specific communication solution: Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS, ISO 9506). On the other side IEC 61850 is referring to the Redundancy standard developed for Factor Automation (IEC 62439 – developed in cooperation between experts from IEC TC 65 and TC 57).

More and more experts are understanding the need to exchange information between all three domains. In the future it will be quite crucial for the Process and Factory/Manufacturing Automation domain to get information from the Power Automation systems – in order to use the electric power more efficiently!

Fortunately there is an easy way to retrieve the information from the Power Automation to an other domain that uses power: IEC 61850.

At the ABB Power and Automation Conference in Orlando, “ARC analyst Barry Young said industry is the number one U.S. consumer of energy by end use sector, followed by transportation, residential and commercial entities.
Process heating (fired heaters) and machine drives are the two biggest energy consumers in the manufacturing sector, and represent the best areas for energy savings opportunity.
Savings as high as 10 percent can be realized with no major investment, said Young, but a major roadblock exists. “Automation and electrification are separate islands, and operators have no view into the power side. They cannot identify or take advantage of energy savings,” he said. …

For 49 percent of companies, energy is not part of active process control. “IEC 61850 is an Ethernet-based solution that provides tight integration between automation and power systems,” said Young. “It is the fieldbus for electrical [systems]. Adoption, however, has been slow due to the learning curve.”” … Hm, it is much more than a fieldbus!!

Click HERE for the report from the ABB conference.

It is easier to look into the Power Automation System (with a single solution: IEC 61850) than into the other systems (with the many many field busses in IEC 61158 …).

Want to look into the Power Automation System? Just use a simple IEC 61850 DLL (Dynamic Link Library) and a very simple client software that uses the DLL … and talk to an IEC 61850 compliant power protection or control device:

Click HERE to let YOUR Application speak IEC 61850 in hours.

SEL Reduces Prices for their IEC 61850 Option by 60 percent

One crucial result of the standardization work is that prices of standard based solutions are lowered! A good proof of this expectation is the announced price reduction of IEC 61850 based communication for SEL protection and control IEDs:

SEL reduced the price for the IEC 61850 option by 60 (SIXTY!) percent !!

““Utilities in Brazil, Mexico, the United States, India, Vietnam, Namibia, and many other countries rely on SEL solutions with IEC 61850 technology to maximize their power systems’ reliability and safety,” said Erik Newman, SEL vice president of Sales and Customer Service. “We look forward to offering this new option price to our customers who choose IEC 61850 as a method of communication and integration.”
IEC 61850 was created to be an internationally standardized method of communication and integration and to support systems built from multivendor intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) that are networked to perform protection, monitoring, automation, metering, and control.”

This is what the market expected in the MAP days (during the early nineties). The MAP (Manufacturing Automation Protocols) were just too early … it took another 20 years to get here! It’s not too late – we are still at the beginning of the Journey IEC 61850 and IEC 61400-25.

Click HERE for the press release [PDF].
Click HERE for more information on IEC 61850 provided by SEL.

Read a paper published by Karlheinz Schwarz in November 1991 on the Use of Ethernet instead of Token passing in the MAP 3.0 specification [PDF, 720 KB] - at that time the author did not know about Gigabit Ethernet; and a paper published by Karlheinz Schwarz in March 1991 on the Use of Ethernet as a Fieldbus [PDF, 720 KB].

It just takes time – the waiting for the right standard solution for information exchange, modeling and configuration is over: IEC 61850 is here!

IEC 61850 at Smart Grid Symposium and Exhibition

NettedAutomation GmbH (Karlsruhe/Germany) will present the latest developments in products for IEC 61850 during the

Symposium and Exhibition - Power Distribution Systems of the Future:
Novel solutions of the information and communication technology
as the backbone of Smart Distribution

12.-13. April 2011

darmstadtium
Wissenschafts- und Kongresszentrum
Schlossgraben 1
64283 Darmstadt
Germany

organized by
HEAG Südhessische Energie AG
NTB Technoservice
VDE

Click HERE for information on the event and registration:

What NettedAutomation GmbH will present at both 12:

• Lite Stack implementation for IEC 61850 and IEC 61400-25
• IEC61850@CHIP - THE most efficient way to let devices speak IEC 61850 and IEC 61400-25
• IEC61850 DLL - THE most efficient way to let PCs speak IEC 61850-25
• SCL Configuration Tool (System Configuration Language)
• Ready to GO! ruggedized devices like Gateways, RTUs, generic controller [programmable in IEC 61131-3 (CoDeSys and ISaGRAF) and C/C++], ...
• Experience and international trends in IEC 61850
• Training material

Objectives of the event:

• Exchange of experience between the European and German lighthouse projects.
• Information of the public, of vendors, grid operators and other stakeholders of the energy market, of universities and research institutes about the running lighthouse projects
• Discussion of the broad dissemination of the project results and how to overcome the existing barriers.

IEC Standards like IEC 61850 play a key role in the future Power Generation, Transmission and Distribution Systems. Several presentations and a workshop deal with THE Global accepted and used standard IEC 61850 in the context of Distribution Systems.

IEC 61850 Certificate issued

SystemCorp's IEC 61850 device has successfully been conformance tested. The SystemCorp device was based upon SystemCorp's independently developed IEC 61850 source code and was implemented on the Beck IPC Chip SC143.

Click HERE for a copy of the certificate [PDF, 1MB].