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!