IEC 61850 Profiles and associated Interoperability Tests for Hydro Power Plants

Hydro Power Plants require very complex information models and information exchange services. IEDs are usually acting as client and server in order to receive and send comprehensive reports. The suite of hydro power standards in the series IEC 61850 (IEC 61850-7-510, IEC 61850-10-210, …) define therefore many application specific naming elements like logical device names, prefixes and suffixes of logical nodes and complete data sets (additional means, e.g., in addition to IEC 61850-7-4).

These additional definitions reduce the number of options to a good extent! It helps to reach a high level of interoperability.

IEC 61850-10-210 TS:
Communication networks and systems for power utility automation - Part 10-210: IEC 61850 Interoperability tests – Hydro profile

See document 57/1468/CD 
Commenting closes 2014-08-08

The hydro experts in IEC 61850 have understood that Profiles are an absolute MUST if we want to reach interoperability! A simple (but good) example is the Implementation Guideline “9-2LE” of the UCA Usersgroup.

Another good example of profiles can be found at the VHPReady Website:

http://www.vattenfall.de/de/file/VHP-READY-3.0-englisch.pdf_30408907.pdf

This specification contains two profiles:

1. IEC 60870-5-104 (with all signals specified)
2. IEC 61850 (with all signals specified)

Vendors can not just rely on IEC 61850 and define their own instance models of the needed logical nodes. The logical device names, prefixes and suffixes of logical nodes and complete data sets are already defined – to prevent use of options!!