U.S. Smart Grid development gets support from Europe

AREVA’s Transmission and Distribution division (T&D, based in France) announced the other day that it will deliver crucial components (IEDs - Intelligent Electronic Devices) to support Smart Grid research by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

AREVA provides 13 different IEDs, to be used in the Institute’s labs. The devices will help EPRI to implementing the ‘Smart Grid’: distance protection, transformer protection, line current differential management, feeder management, phasor measurement and GPS time synchronization.
The devices provided by AREVA and other companies, will be used to build a small Smart Grid so that various scenarios and tests can be performed. One of the building blocks will be the IEC 61850 process bus and station bus for system wide interoperability. 

“The goal of this project is to provide a test bed for new ideas to address the challenges facing the Smart Grid,” noted Paul Myrda, Technical Executive at EPRI. “Ultimately, we expect to couple this facility with our existing ‘living lab’ that primarily deals with end-user devices and with our ‘Sensor’ lab that is focused on asset health assessment.”

Smart Grids will be composed of devices, systems and tools from multiple vendors. The key issue in multi-vendor projects is the Interoperability of all components that provide or consume information for the many tasks.

An interoperability test lab based on the IEC 61850 station bus has been build up by STRI (Ludvika, Sweden):

Click HERE for an overview about the IEC 61850 Interoperability lab.
Click HERE for a story on "The true meaning of IEC 61850 - Interoperability!"
Click HERE to see what's next on the agenda of training for multi-vendor systems.

ABB and others push IEC 61850 all over

According to a news letter dated 2009-05-04 "ABB has introduced and exploited the benefits of IEC 61850 for customers in 55 countries and supplied hundreds of systems and thousands of products for new substation installations, as well as retrofit and migration projects. ... ABB played a key role in developing and verifying this global standard, and actually commissioned the world’s first IEC 61850 multi-vendor project in 2004 at the 380 kilovolt (kV) Laufenburg substation in Switzerland – one of the largest and most important substations in Europe."

Click HERE for the ABB news report.

All big vendors like ABB, AREVA, GE, SEL, Siemens, and several others, utilities and several independent consultants have heavily contributed to the standard - and are still contributing!

During today's one-day seminar on IEC 61850 organized by Asia iKnowledge Sdn. Bhd. here in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) it was interesting to see the huge interest of power, gas and oil utilities in the new standard! It was clearly reported and confirmed by key people that attended that the education of "smart" engineers in the new standards is one of the crucial pre-requisite for smarter grids!

Click HERE [pdf, 600 KB] for today's program and the program of the conference tomorrow and Thursday.

What would Smart Grids be without Microsoft?

AREVA T&D (Transmission and Distribution division) announced on May 12, 2009, the extension of a 3-year long collaboration with Microsoft to develop Smarter Grid Management solutions to help the worldwide power industry to provide reliable power. AREVA T&D sees Microsoft as a strategic partner for smart grid solutions.

Click HERE for AREVA's press release.

I am not surprised that Microsoft tries to stick the nose into the tent of the electric power system's automation and control solutions. By the way, Microsoft has taken a very active role already: There are so many Microsoft Office Power Point slides discussing the Smart Grids and Smarter Grids available on the Web - paper doesn't blush.

In some years we will see how much smarter the grid will be as today. The smartness has to be found first at the side of human beings - then we may use tools (like ...) for devices and systems.

Do all these myriads of tools help us? Yes, if ... No, if ...

You may like the following sayings (I read some time ... I do not know who wrote it first) which I use very often:

A fool with a tool is still a fool; and 
A fool with a tool can foul up projects faster than a fool without a tool.

One of the crucial challenges in the domain of power delivery systems is to get more "non-fool" experts for the development of tools and for the use of tools. That requires EDUCATION. Isn't it?

Power delivery systems have provided us with reliable power for decades - without many "soft" tools ... talk to some well experienced senior engineers. The future of reliable and affordable power delivery systems will mainly depend on smart engineers that can judge to do the right things. Smart engineers are those that are well educated or got experience with bad judgements:

Tools are not a substitute for good judgment, and
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

Multi-Vendor Test Case at Frankfurt IEC 61850 training

STRI and NettedAutomation GmbH arranged the second "Comprehensive & Independent Hands-on Training" for IEC 61850 in Frankfurt, March 3-6 2009 with participants from Europe, America and Africa. The multivendor test installation with IEDs from ABB, Areva and Siemens communicating over a RuggedCom network and equipped with an Omicron test set was shipped in advance from STRI to be the test environment for the hands-on course: But it did not arrive on time. What to do now?

One crucial objective of IEC 61850 is TEAMWORK: To make different vendors to talk to each other and to work together. Omicron shipped a new test set overnight from Austria, the Doble participant to the course had brought a Doble test set and Megger/Programma surprised us with a new test set. And we got two new Ethernet switches from the Hirschmann attendee. What about the IEDs? The participant from SEL brought a Schweizer IED for IEC 61850, Siemens sent a new IED and Nicholas picked up a new Areva IED at their training center in Frankfurt. Programma offered us to borrow an ABB RET670 that Carl Öhlén from STRI picked up in Stockholm before flying down to Frankfurt.

One of the hotel rooms became the IEC 61850 instant system integration and engineering center ...

DHL did a good job to force us the demonstration of REAL multivendor support and multivendor interoperability of new equipment that just arrived.

Read more details on the excellent experience on multivendor support during the Frankfurt event.

The next public IEC 61850 hands-on training will be on October 20-23, 2009 in Frankfurt.

In-house hands-on training - a solution where your people do not need to travel - is also possible. Your equipment can also be used in the multivendor hands-on training.

A big European Transmission Grid company has contracted with NettedAutomation to intensively train their SAS staff including hands-on training together with STRI .

Contact NettedAutomation for details.

E.ON - Erfahrungen mit IEC 61850

Die E.ON Thüringer Energie AG hat Ende 2008 erste Erfahrungen mit dem Einsatz der Normenreihe IEC 61850 vorgestellt:

"Vorgehensweisen und Erfahrungen mit der IEC 61850"

In einem Vortrag wurden Ideen und Ziele bezüglich des Einsatzes der IEC 61850 bei der E.ON Thüringer Energie AG im Rahmen eines Pilotprojektes vorgestellt und diskutiert.

Download Foliensatz

Die Ergebnissse liegen - vor dem Hintergrund der internationalen Erfahrungen - ganz auf Linie der Erfahrungen anderer großer Versorgungsunternehmen. Um die Anforderungen und Wünsche der Energieversorger (vor allem die nachhaltige Interoperabilität von Geräten und Werkzeugen!!) zukünftig umfassend und befriedigend zu erfüllen, sind weitergehende Abstimmungen der Hersteller untereinander, der Hersteller mit den Anwendern und aller Betroffenen mit den Normungsarbeiten notwendig. Bei der Normenreihe IEC 61850 verhält es sich so wie mit dem Baustoff Beton: Es kommt darauf an, was man daraus macht!

E.ON resümiert unter anderem, dass die betroffenen Experten die Normenreihe erst einmal verstehen müssen - und sicher auch, was die Hersteller bisher daraus gemacht haben. Einen Einblick in Produkte der ersten Generation großer Hersteller wie Siemens, Areva und ABB wird auf der neutralen Plattform eines Trainingkurses vom 3.-6. März 2009 in Frankfurt (Main) geboten.

Details zum Training