Saturday, February 21, 2015

Neues vom Verein VHPready – E-World Messeerfahrung

Sie finden auf der Website von VHPready sehr interessante Berichte zur Messe E-World und Beiträge:

- das White Paper zu VHPready 4.0

- ein Résumé zum E-world Messeauftritt des Industrieforums

- die Presseinformationen zur E-world

- die Vortragsfolien zu einem VHPready-Vortrag im „Energy Transition“ Forum der E-world

- eine Veröffentlichung in den „Energie & Management Powernews“, in der LichtBlick und Fraunhofer FOKUS zu Wort kommen.

Weiterhin ist die Kurzdarstellung der VHPready Services GmbH (i.G.) inzwischen auch auf Englisch verfügbar.

Einige Aussagen von Besuchern auf dem Messestand:

„Angesichts der vielen auf der Messe gezeigten Szenarien Virtueller Kraftwerke wird die Dringlichkeit von Standardisierung deutlich.“

„Wir haben uns beim Messerundgang schon gewundert, wie die vielen proprietären Lösungen zusammenspielen sollen. Endlich haben wir jemanden gefunden, der sich um die Standardisierung der Kommunikation kümmert!“

„Endlich ein Standard, der auf praktischen Erfahrungen beruht und nicht von anwendungsfernen Technokraten gemacht wurde.“

„Sehr gut, dass Ihr von Beginn an international denkt!“

IEC 61850: Protection and SCADA Seminars (updated)

The IEC 61850 applied for several years to many new substation designs all over the world. During the seminar, truly experienced and vendor independent engineers will help you to see and understand how use the core parts of the IEC 61850 standard are applied in substation design, monitoring, protection and control applications.

Attendees will learn from a senior protection engineer, how the protection system will improve and understand the crucial lessons learned since the first projects with IEC 61850 in 2004.

Seminar contents:

IEC 61850 Introduction (Edition 1, 2, and 2.1) and experience after 10 years in operation. Where are we today?

Return of experience, applications and practical demonstrations: Protection and Control in Substation Automation, Engineering and Configuration, Maintenance, Monitoring and SCADA system, Specification of the IEC 61850 protection and control system.

Through the practical demonstrations you will learn: To handle IEC 61850 relay protections from different vendors and their software tools; to be able to efficiently manage flexibility in engineering and interoperability. To use the state of the art IEC 61850 testing tools and equipment to efficiently detect the technical problems and work-out their solutions. To understand SCL files, setup clients and servers for MMS communication to SCADA and RTU Systems All the presentations are supported by practical examples or demonstrations.

The following 3 days special training courses are offered by FMTP (Uppsala, Sweden) and NettedAutomation:

Hong Kong
27-29 April 2015
Details and registration

Berlin (Germany)
05-07 May 2015
Details and registration

Bratislava (Slovakia)
18-20 May 2015
Details and registration

Brussels (Belgium)
08-10 June 2015
Details and registration

I look forward to seeing you there.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

VHPready Signal MMXU1.TotW.instMag – versus IOA 113

Signals configured in IEC 61850 and configured in IEC 60870-5-104 look quite different.

The following figure shows the same signal (Current electric Power – Aktuell erzeugte elektrische Leistung) in IEC 61850 (left) and IEC 60870-5-104 (right):

image

The IEC 61850 model exposes the value, quaity and timestamp as well as the semantic (TotalWatt). The total watt of what? Of the “Current electric Power – Aktuell erzeigte elektrische Leistung” as described in the DC (description of the signal).

On the other side we have the information object address (IOA = 113) that carries the same value in IEC 60870-5-104. What does the value 3456 mean? No idea in IEC 60870-5-104. You have to know upfront what 113 means. IEC 61850 stores the meaning in the device (model).

In the above case we see also the IOA=113 in the description (DC) of the IEC 61850 model. It is a text string attached to the DC attribute.

Monday, February 9, 2015

IEC 61850 Series is Growing to a Total of 45 Parts

IEC 61850 (Communication networks and systems for power utility automation) is a unique standards series providing a consistent set of standards, draft standards and other IEC publications.

A total of 45 parts cover many application domains in the Power Delivery System. An additional five (5) parts are published under the number IEC 61400-25 (extensions of IEC 61850 for Wind Power).

Document types of IEC:
IS = Standard
TR = Technical Report
TS = Technical Specification

21 Parts are already officially published. 24 draft parts are under preparation. Several drafts will be officially published in 2015.

The list of all documents:

image image image

In order to keep the crucial contents (mainly models and services) of these parts consistent, IEC TC 57 WG 10, 17, and 18 have done a tremendous work in converting the crucial contents into UML documents. This allows to extend and maintain the models with support of tools. In future we will see standard documents automatically derived from the UML Models.

Congratulation to all people contributing to this great standard series IEC 61850!

Some 20 years after the IEC TC 57 has decided (in 1995) to write a new standard for substation protection and automation, we see a lot of interest in many different application domains.

In case you need help to understand the many different parts and how they could contribute to solve needs you are faced with today and tomorrow – let me know please.

Even IEC 61850 is a huge Standard Series – it must be accompanied by REAL APPLICATIONS and underlying network infrastructure. The 7 ISO/OSI layers are just a foundation for IEC 61850 – both together are used by applications:

image

The applications of IEC 61850 can range from a simple polling of a temperature measurement up to comprehensive Schedules to manage distributed energy resources.

By the way: Te cake was very tasty!

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Standard IEC 62351-3 “Communication network and system security - Profiles including TCP/IP” published

IEC TC 57 has published the crucial standard for security:

Standard IEC 62351-3
Power systems management and associated information exchange - Data and communications security -
Part 3: Communication network and system security - Profiles including TCP/IP

Partie 3: Sécurité des réseaux et des systèmes de communication – Profils comprenant TCP/IP

image

This part of IEC 62351 specifies how to secure TCP/IP-based protocols through constraints on the specification of the messages, procedures, and algorithms of Transport Layer Security (TLS) (defined in RFC 5246) so that they are applicable to the telecontrol environment of the IEC. TLS is applied to protect the TCP communication. It is intended that this standard be referenced as a normative part of other IEC standards (e.g., IEC 60870-5, IEC 60870-6, IEC 61850, IEC 61400-25, …) that have the need for providing security for their TCP/IP-based protocol.

Now it is up to the vendors and users to implement this standard or require it, respectively.

There is no accuse anymore that IEC 61850 has no security measures defined in form of a standard that can officially be referenced.

Click HERE for the preview of the new standard.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Visit Booth of VHPready at E-World 2015 in Essen

The industry alliance VHPready e.V. will present the project at the E-World 2015 in

Essen (Gemany)
10. - 12. February 2015
Halle 6, Stand 109

Co-exhibitors are:

  • Fraunhofer FOKUS (co-exhibitor)
  • Beck IPC GmbH (co-exhibitor)
  • SSV Software Systems GmbH (co-exhibitor)
  • PHOENIX CONTACT Electronics GmbH (co-exhibitor)

You could see the IEC 61850 (and IEC 60870-5-104) Model of VHPready 3.0 in action … seen through an IEC 61850 Browser:

image

Have a look at the booth!

Sunday, February 1, 2015

HMS: Bridging Fieldbus Communication to Power Automation

HMS (one of the most crucial supporter of field busses for industrial and process Automation) brings the huge installed base of field instrumentation closer to the power automation and vice versa. With the new approach customers can tap and exchange crucial process information with the most successful power communication standards like IEC 60870-5-104 or DNP3 and others.

HMS provides a new family of products for smart grid applications using IEC 60870-5-104, IEC 61850, Modbus, Profibus, Profinet, HART, …: The LABLINE SG gateway family targets Demand Response (networking of industrial electric loads) and Virtual Power Plants (networking of energy resources like biogas plants or combined heat and power units) applications.

NettedAutomation’s Motto since 2000 is: The NET is The Automation. Networking is really crucial – and also to understand what this all means! Do you know how to bridge the gaps between signals communicated with Profibus DP and IEC 60870-5-104? HMS has the solution to bridge almost all gaps between factory and process instrumentation field busses and the power world.

Remote Terminal Unit
The LABLINE SG devices support the communication protocols used in the energy sector, e.g. IEC60870-5-104, DNP3 and IEC61850; as well as protocols supported by the electric equipment in the field, e.g. Modbus or M-Bus. The LABLINE SG gateways can also communicate with industrial fieldbus or industrial Ethernet networks such as Profibus, Profinet or any other industrial network thanks to their Anybus technology.

Smart Gateway 
The application logic can be programmed on the device either using a graphical web editor or for more complex applications through the embedded soft-PLC from CODESYS compliant to IEC61131-3 standard.

Click HERE for more details of the new family of products.

More to come.

Seminar Schedule of FMTP and NettedAutomation updated

The need for solid education and hands-on demonstrations and hands-on training is more obvious at the beginning of 2015 than ever before.

FMTP and NettedAutomation have updated their public training courses. The following public courses for the next months are scheduled:

23-25 März Karlsruhe Almost Sold Out:
3-tägiges Seminar & Hands-On Training in Deutsch
05-08 May
13-16 Oct
Frankfurt NEW General Public Courses in ENGLISH
27-29 April Hong Kong Special Public Courses in ENGLISH for Protection Engineers and SCADA Applications
18-20 May Bratislava(Slovakia) Special Public Courses in ENGLISH for Protection Engineers and SCADA Applications
08-10 June Brussels (Belgium Special Public Courses in ENGLISH for Protection Engineers and SCADA Applications

Click HERE for details.

According to the many enquiries FMTP and NettedAutomation received, we are negotiating with several groups all over.

The most efficient courses are in-house training courses – appreciated by many well known international companies all over.

Stay tuned to see updated schedules and news. Or contact us for more information.

IEC 61850 is more than just a “Future Trend”

A manager from a big Asian power utility wrote me the other day:

“Dear Karlheinz,
… because of the schedule of my visit to the CIGRE2014 session at Paris, also an overseas trip for our protection experts to XXXX at Nanjing and YYYY at Tokyo in late September 2014. For one thing that I could learn from both trips, IEC 61850 should no longer be called a "future trend" for the power industry, as it is already the adapted practice everywhere! Just you know it is always not easy to implement new standards in the utilities, especially talking about some well-established ones ...”.

The standard series IEC 61850 is now available for some 10 years. Many manufacturers of automation systems have implemented a reasonable subset of the standards. It’s in use all over. Don’t worry if your management has still to be convinced to implement or use the standards. It takes some time to get there.

It may happen that in some cases you may have to wait for one or two retirements …it’ll come.

Note: Haste produces waste. Take your time – in the meantime get yourself and your people trained to understand what it is all about.