IEC 61850: Communication Interfaces for Mobile Battery Energy Storage Applications

A. Bonetti ... NO, NOT Andrea Bonetti, but his son Alessandro wrote a very remarkable Master Thesis at KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) (Stockholm, Sweden):

Communication Interfaces for Mobile Battery Energy Storage Applications

Alessandro, Congratulation! Excellent!

You wrote: "Then, I give my sincere appreciation to Karlheinz Schwarz for answering my questions regarding modeling, and maintaining an open blog with comments and thoughts regarding power system automation."

You are welcome!

Excerpt from the Abstract:

"This thesis project, carried out at Northvolt Systems, aims to analyze the existing and readily used communication interfaces for a specific set of mobileBESS applications. The analysis is performed by a literature review of typical mobile BESS applications with the identified corresponding communication interfaces. Among the identified interfaces is the IEC 61850 standard, which shows suitability in smart grid applications, enabling interoperability,vendor-independence, and standardization. To provide a real-life analysis of the IEC 61850 benefits and applicability to mobile BESS, an integration of the standard to a Northvolt mobile BESS was performed."

Click HERE to access the abstract and the download link.

Click HERE to watch a nice video from Andrea Bonetti about IEC 61850 for power systems.

Andrea, You could be proud of your son Alessandro!

Basics For The Future Electric Power Systems – Some Thoughts

Smart Grids, Energiewende, renewable energy, ... Digitalisierung (digitization) der Energiewende, ... are buzzwords for some years. What is really needed for the future electric power systems?

Against the background of the ongoing discussions by engineers, lawyers, politicians, other people ... with a degree in the social or natural sciences, graduate engineers, medical doctors, lawyers, and graduates of business studies and economics, it may be helpful to look at the real needs that are related to the physics ...

I have written a one page document:

Basics for the future electric power systems – some thoughts 

It starts (de and en):

"Das zentraleuropäische Verbundnetz UCTE ist eine der größten Maschinen (oder gar bezüglich der Leistungsfähigkeit der Energiebereitstellung weltweit die größte Maschine) auf unserem Planeten. Bezüglich der Ausdehnung wird dieses elektrische Netz nur von dem inzwischen weltweit ausgedehnten Kommunikationsnetz übertroffen. Alle diese technischen Netze folgen dabei strikt physikalischen Gesetzen – egal, von wem sie und zu was sie genutzt werden oder auch welche Ideen am Markt gerade en vogue sind..."

"The central European interconnected network UCTE is one of the largest machines (or even the world's largest machine in terms of the performance of energy supply) on our planet. In terms of expansion, this electrical network is only surpassed by the communications network that has now expanded worldwide. All these technical networks strictly follow physical laws - regardless of who uses them and for what they are used or which ideas are currently in vogue on the market..."

Click HERE to download the above mentioned document [pdf, 108 KB de/en]

IEC Draft TR 61850-90-9 - "IEC 61850 for Electrical Energy Storage Systems" Published

IEC TC 57 just published the 138 page IEC Draft TR 61850-90-9

IEC 61850 for Electrical Energy Storage Systems

57/2128/DTR
Voting closes 2019-09-27

This is one of the next crucial extensions for DER-Models of IEC 61850-7-420. This TR will be merged into the 7-420 later on.

The Introduction states: " ...This technical report is primarily based on the recommendation 5.7.4. “interface, control and standard data elements”, of the IEC white paper ”Electrical Energy Storage” published in December 2011 by the MSB. The recommendation proposes the necessity of a standardization of interfaces between storage and other grid elements, protocols for data exchange and control rules, and data elements for input, output and control information supplied by or to storage systems. ..."

Click HERE for the mentioned IEC White Paper.

"This technical report describes IEC 61850 information model for electrical energy storage systems (EESS). Therefore the report only focuses on storage functionality in the purpose of grid integration of such systems at the DER unit level. Higher level Interactions are already covered in IEC 61850-7-420. ... "

The draft defines more than 150 new Data Objects. Excerpt of the first 15 Data Objects:



The blue marked text refers to the Logical Node from which this Data Object is inherited.

This document refers to the standards IEC 61850-7-x and defines additional very crucial information for the configuration, control, monitoring of a battery system.
It is very crucial for the success of the DER models to get implementation and application experience with these very comprehensive and complex models.
Taking into account that the mentioned White Paper was already published in 2011, we learn a crucial lesson: It took a lot of time to get where we are today. And it will take years to get these definitions implemented and used in the power delivery systems. In the mean time you need to tap the experience of engineers that understand the possible use-cases that can harvest the benefits of applying these standards.