OPC UA is About to Follow IEC 61850 in its Energy Initiative

The standard series IEC 61850 has already helped globally for more than 20 years to improve (with a broad approach) the power system engineering, system and device configuration, information modelling, and information sharing ... helping to reach a high level of reuse-ability and getting more resilient systems ... keeping the power flowing and the grass green.

Many years after it became obvious that IEC 61850 uses such a broad approach, the time has come that the OPC Foundation tries to benefit from the big success of IEC 61850!! Really!

According to the OPC Foundation Energy Initiative [7 page PDF] standardized "Semantic Information Models of Energy-related Systems ..." are planned to use IEC 61850! Wow!

Excerpt: 

"In 2024. OPC UA has started to look at the whole energy market to help simplify, standardize and improve the resilience of connection points. Not only among the five major energy components but also within. ... One important standard that is widely used in substations, wind farms, solar array and other large utility size installations is the IEC 61850. The OPC UA Wind and Solar PV Operations and Monitoring (SPOM) working group, together with the IEC 61850-20 working group has started mapping the 61850 models to OPC UA models ...

THE CHALLENGE: FRAGMENTED ENERGY DATA

Many factories lack a consistent way to collect and analyze energy data from machines, devices, and production systems. Different communication technologies and proprietary interfaces often prevent seamless integration of energy information. Without standardized data structures and semantics, companies struggle to gain a clear overview of their energy usage. This makes it difficult to identify optimization potential, implement coordinated energy-saving measures, ..."

For exactly these reasons, the electric power industry started in the year 1995 to develop the standard series IEC 61850! The struggle is reduced since IEC 61850 touched the road.

With IEC 61850-8-3 (web-based communication using WebSockets, JSON and DER encodings) a new and modern information sharing is underway - while preserving the rest of IEC 61850 (engineering, configuration, models, ...) unchanged.

It is also interesting to see how the wind industry that developed the standard series IEC 61400-25 (Wind Turbines) has understood that the deviation from IEC 61850 as it happened in the first two editions of IEC 61400-25-2 (models) was not a good idea. The third edition of IEC 61400-25-2 will be harmonized with IEC 61850 (The ORIGINAL).

Congratulation for using THE ORIGINAL! ... always use the original IEC 61850 ... if possible ...