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.

IEC 61850: Is Interchangeability possible?

Yes – If you are seriously requiring it, it is likely that you will get it. Sure: You have to pay for it. You may need to spend some time to find the right vendor … system integrator, consultant to help you getting there. The key issue is education and training.

A very interesting question is currently discussed at LinkedIn:

“Dear all, How far are we from living the of plug & play age of SAS devices (real and full interoperability under IEC 61850 platform)?”

Click HERE for the complete (public) discussion.

One of my contributions is this:

“I guess it would be so easy to reach the goal of "exchangeability": IF (only IF !!) substation owners would specify which parts of their future SAS SHALL BE based on the standard and specify the SCD in sufficient details, in order to simplify, e.g., adding a new Bay Controller coming from a thirty part IED vendor.
That may work fine within one owner (utility) - but not between different owners.
I have seen such an SCD document (6+ MB) ... written by a big TSO ...
I am quite sure that this TSO will reach that goal in the near future - I am not sure if all vendors will like the approach.”

You could easily contribute to the discussion on LinkedIn … or comment on this blog post directly.

Power Utility Automation Or Power Automation?

The title of IEC 61850 is “Communication networks and systems for power utility automation”. The restriction to power utility is an artificial one required by the standardization organization – it is not set by the industry.

In fact the scope of the IEC 61850 series is: “Communication networks and systems for power automation”.

Wherever power is generated, transported, distributed, and used, IEC 61850 provides the needed tools to provide a standardized interface for information, information engineering, and information exchange. There is no difference between a 3-phase AC system in a distribution system inside an Industrial Facility or outside in an utility grid. I guess you agree, that voltage phase A is voltage phase A.

All crucial information models for electrical systems are defined in IEC 61850-7-4 (core), IEC 61850-7-410 (hydro), IEC 61850-7-420 (DER), IEC 61850-90-7 (inverters), IEC 61850-90-17 (power quality), … It would be in the interest of keeping the reliability of power delivery high, to use ONE standard for all power related applications (in public utilities and in any factory or other plant or site).

There seem some people to apply the “fieldbus approach” … publishing new standards for power systems inside Industrial Facilities AND for an interface between the two domains (between Industrial Facilities and Power Utilities). Fortunately the power does not care if it is flowing inside or outside an Industrial Facility. Why not just use ONE standard (IEC 61850) for applications inside Industrial Facilities, inside Power Utilities, and between the both domains.

The IEC TC 65 has published a Committee Draft to open the door for a new standard:

IEC 65/555/CD: IEC/TS 62872 Ed. 1.0:
System interface between Industrial Facilities and the Smart Grid

Click HERE for a brief project description.
Contact your National Committee for a copy.

Security and IEC 61850: Is it about Bug Fixes or Systematic Issues?

These days experts discuss the future of more secure IEDs and systems in the world of Industrial Control Systems (ICS). Note: ICS is also used in power systems – no question.

There are people that focus on single bugs and how to solve them by patching et cetera. Other experts are more looking at the systematic security problems in control systems.

Eric Byres, CTO and vice president of Tofino Security, a division of Belden, says “It will take major players like Exxon, Duke Energy, for instance, and other corporations with the ICS purchasing power, he says, to force vendors to step up and fix the systemic security issues."

Read a comprehensive discussion about the two positions – quite crucial and interesting.

What do you think about translating this statement into the issues we have with IEC 61850 Interoperability?

It will take major players like AEP, SCE, E.ON, EDF, RWE, Duke Energy, for instance, and other corporations with the ICS purchasing power, to force vendors to step up and fix the systemic interoperability issues with regard to IEC 61850."

This would help to prevent a lot of frustrations during factory and site acceptance tests.

Why do we see just a few major players from the utility domain using their force to improve interoperability? There are several reasons I see:

• Wall Street, Frankfurter Börse, …
• Ignorance of issues
• Not enough experts
• Attitude: just fix what brakes
• …

Recommendation from my side: Vendors and users should cooperate more in Teamwork and agree on writing documents like “How to profile IEC 61850, IEC 60870-5, …” to get specific profile specifications for a specific application that have (hopefully) not left options to ignore or to chose from.

A good example is the Vattenfall VHP Ready specification (Virtual Heat an Power). This spec defines the IOA for signals according to IEC 60870-5-104 and the Logical Device, Logical Node and Data Object Names.

Example 104:

Example IEC 61850:

If utilities do not specify what they want, they may experience a big surprise when they get the system delivered and installed. They may get much less or much more than what they expected.

And note this: When we get more standard conformant and interoperable IEDs installed, they are definitely linked to the Security issues discussed at the beginning!

What we are looking for is: Interoperable and Secure IEDs and Systems. We should not separate these two requirements! They are highly interrelated.

SCADA Security at Iberdrola – Be serious about Security!

Iberdrola has been awarded a 2012 European SCADA Security Innovation Award.

“Iberdrola is the largest energy company in Spain and operates multiple types of energy production plants (gas, coal, water, eolic, nuclear) in multiple countries in the European Union and Latin America. … The history of Iberdrola is one of innovation. In early 2000 Iberdrola decided to create the CMDS, a 24x7 Monitoring Center for the operations of their Critical Infrastructure. Inside the scope of the CMDS, and with a codename of AURA, a long-term security program for the in-depth security of their SCADA networks was put in motion. … In 2011, Iberdrola started two of the latest and most innovative projects to date: AURA.MARS and AURA CONSEG. ...”

Read the press release from SANS.

Comprehensive presentation from Iberdrola “Step by Step: The Journey to Secure SCADA Systems” [pdf, 5,3 MB]

It is really crucial to be serious about Security!!

ENTSO-E statement on the IEC61850 standard

ENTSO-E representing 41 TSOs from 34 European countries has published earlier in 2012 a statement on IEC 61850 for the application in European Transmission Systems. The statement criticizes that the level of interoperability expected by the utilities has not yet been implemented by the vendors.

This is also my personal experience speaking to hundreds of utility experts all over. What happened? How can it be overcome?

The main reason for some challenges in getting a higher degree of interoperability is that the same utilities (from the 41 in ENTSO-E) that are now complaining DID NOT get enough involved in the standardization process AND NOT in the process of implementation and first pilot tests. The feedback (needed in such comprehensive standards) was very weak.

I was personally seriously impacted by the changes in the utility industry some 10 years ago: The industry has funded my (and other peoples) involvement in the standardization work until 2002 – to help to make sure that the utilities’ requirements got implemented in the standards!! For the next 10 (crucial!) years after 2002 almost NO UTILITY expert showed up or was seriously involved. The vendors were finishing the standards without the “control” of the utility industry. AND: The first implementations and projects were not really watched and commented by the utility experts. The vendors still are preferably implementing turn-key substations often WITHOUT utility experts involved! Utility people usually have very little understanding what IEC 61850 means.

On one side it is unfair to not really showing up and not getting sufficiently involved in the process for the last 10 years and then – when some minor issues are still not solved – complain that the TSO’s requirements have not been fully met! Several experts have tried some 10 years ago to convince several CEOs of big utilities to continue funding the standardization work! We did not have any chance!

By the way – the good sign is now that the ENTSO-E TSOs WOKE UP! Hope that they will get back to become again a serious partner in the international standardization and in the implementation and application of the standards.

Download the ENTSO-E statement on IEC 61850

In the meantime many other domain have decided to use IEC 61850 – in most cases the interoperability at a very high degree is reached in these applications.

All market stake-holders are invited to get involved – some may first need to get some education to understand that IEC 61850 is more than just another protocol.

The statement refers to EPRI’s UCA development that has cost some 50.000.000 USD !! Where are the European utilities that are willing to spend a reasonable amount of Euros to get the remaining requirements of the TSO implemented in the years to come?!

I look forward to receiving many enquiries for training courses from European TSOs in the years to come ;-)

I have trained many utilities all over to help them to understand the standards, products, tools, and the vendors … often utility experts have NO clue what this is all about!

Smart Grid Last Mile Infrastructure

20 experts from 15 companies have drafted an architecture for “A Standardized and Flexible IPv6 Architecture for Field Area Networks”.

The “paper is intended to provide a synthetic and holistic view of open standards Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) based architecture for Smart Grid Last Mile Infrastructures in support of a number of advanced Smart Grid
applications (meter readout, demand-response, telemetry, and grid monitoring and automation) and its benefit as a true Multi-Services platform. … provide an efficient, flexible, secure, and multi-service network based on open standards.”

IEC TC 57 standards like CIM, IEC 61850, and IEC 610870, as well as DNP3, IEEE 1888, and Modbus are understood as crucial application standards.

Click HERE for the above architecture.

What is IEEE 1888? A new IEEE project …

Standard for Ubiquitous Green Community Control Network Protocol

Click HERE for some background information
Click HERE for the PAR
Click HERE to visit the project website.

I hope that the experts involved in the project IEEE 1888 will rely on standards like CIM, IEC 61850, and IEC 610870, … Hope that the energy automation market is smarter than the industrial automation market: keeping the number of protocol solutions very low!! The industrial automation domain has a lot of headaches with the proliferation of the many many protocols (100+)!!

Distribution Company Vector’s Ten-Years Plan for IEC 61850

Vector Limited is the electric power distribution company in the Auckland (New Zealand) area. The company publishes every year an Asset Management Plan (AMP) – informing the public and others what the company is planning to do with their assets. The current plan covers a ten year planning period from 1 April 2011 to 31 March 2021.

One goal of the current AMP is to demonstrate innovation and efficiency improvements. What does this mean related to IEC 61850? A lot in the past and in the future:

• Vector’s substation automation system is based on resilient optical
  Ethernet local area network running IEC 61850 compliant IEDs.
• Vector’s current standard for internal and external communication systems is IEC 61850 standard. DNP3 is also used as an interim solution.
• At present over 50% of Vector’s primary substation are equipped with IEC 61850 compliant IEDs.
• Vector has been running an annual RTU replacement programme for a number of years, and is currently replacing approximately 10 RTUs per region per annum. To replace conventional RTUs, two approved solutions have been used, traditional RTUs with a migration path to IEC 61850, and fully compliant IEC 61850 solutions.
• …

Click HERE for the current plan (2011-2021) [PDF, 10 MB]

Utility Experience with IEC 61850 at eThekwini Electricity

There are just a few reports from utility personnel describing the impact of IEC 61850 on substation protection and automation systems. A report from eThekwini Electricity provides some results of the application of IEC 61850 based systems. Worth to read report.

With regard to the Financial Implications the reports states:

“An exercise has been carried out to determine the financial impact
of the new philosophy. This exercise has produced some better
than expected results.”

Click HERE for the complete paper [7 pages pdf].

IEC 61850 for Substations Only?

The title and scope of IEC 61850 was for many years very restricted:

2001 – 2009: Communication networks and systems in substations

2010 – … : Communication networks and systems for power utility automation

The new title and scope is still too restrictive! The working group wanted to change to “… for automation”. This was not accepted by the IEC Central Office. IEC deals with electro-technical matters. The term “automation” was understood as to broad.

From a content point of view IEC 61850 could be used all over where measurements and status information needs to be communicated – in any application domain. Even if you are just monitoring a process or system (no control need) you can use IEC 61850 models, messages and configuration tools.

The Model “STMP” (temperature supervision logical node) can be used wherever a temperature measurement is taken: Temperature of a transformer, of a room, ambient temperature or your body temperature. When the “STMP.Tmp.mag” value reached the configured limit (Alarm limit or Trip limit) an report or a GOOSE message may be issued.

By the way, IEC 61850 has rules how to define extended logical nodes and data objects. All values can be communicated the Ethernet and TCP/IP based information exchange methods.

Experts pointing to the scope “substations” are not up-to-date. Those arguing that IEC 61850 is for “power utility automation” only may not like to accept that IEC 61850 is very generic or common – applicable in a wide range of applications.

The title and scope are just “toner on paper”.

Is IEC 61850 Plug&Play or like DNP4.0 or IEC 60870-5-105?

There are many different expectations I heard from protection and control experts all over. Some people guess that IEC 61850 provides Plug&Play capabilities – meaning: Utilities just purchase IEC 61850 IEDs and (all in a sudden) their protection and control systems are up and running! There is a group of other people that expects that IEC 61850 is just another protocol – a bit more than today’s solutions … something like “DNP4.0” or “IEC 60870-5-105” [of course DNP4.0 and 105 are not real!].

IEC 61850 is much more than DNP3.0 and IEC 60870-5-104, and it does NOT provide Plug&Play. Building substation protection and control systems requires to understand the applications (the many protection and protection related requirements) and to find a way how to apply IEC 61850 compliant IEDs and tools to solve their many needs.

IEC 61850 is a suite of tools that can be used to solve application needs. How to use the tools and when, is NOT defined in the standard! Utilities have to find their (step by step) way to get started with IEC 61850 based solutions. It is important to get started – don’t wait until IEC 61850 solves all your needs and problems. This will never happen!

Some US experts have discussed in 2005 or early 2006 what IEC 61850 provides and what needs to be done to apply the standard and standard based solutions. They show that IEC 61850 has an impact on many aspects in system design and deployment.

IEC 61850
A Practical Application Primer for Protection Engineers
Bogdan Kasztenny, James Whatley, Eric A. Udren, John Burger, Dale Finney, Mark Adamiak

Click HERE for the 43 page paper – worth to read.

My hope is that readers of the paper (hopefully readers from the utilities – or students finishing their education soon) understand that IEC 61850 requires utility people that are well educated in IEC 61850 – in order to understand what the big vendors have commissioned and how to use the various features of the new design.

Today I received an email from one the international biggest transmission utilities asking for help in better understanding what is needed and what has been commissioned:

“Karlheinz, …. As you probably know, there are more and more digital substations in XXX, provided by XXX and XXX for the time being. Even if our contracts does not specify explicitly the use of 61850, they are based on this standard. Today, these substations can be viewed as black boxes, without really taking into consideration the advantages of new digital technologies. …”

One of the crucial needs is: MORE EDUCATION FOR UTILITY EXPERTS!! I have met many utility people that were responsible for the substations based on IEC 61850 – but DID NOT any clue how to use IEC 61850 build in functions.

IEC 61850 has a crucial impact on the WHOLE system and the engineers that build systems.

Finally, SCADA applications (to get status changes, limit violations, measurements, statistical information, historical information, …) can apply IEC 61850 right away with commercially available Off-The-Shelf (COTS) solutions like the well appreciated Windows DLL for IEC 61850 (applicable for servers, clients, publishers, and subscribers).

Click HERE for a Windows DLL evaluation kit with an C# application example including source code of the client and server applications (that use the DLL).

E3 Group for Studies on IEC 61850 Went Public

I have reported earlier on the very appreciated “Teamwork” of Spanish utilities in working together to reach a higher level of interoperability in IEC 61850 multivendor projects.

Their objective is (from their website):

• Share information among companies and walk together through IEC 61850
• Generate a minimum common specification (available for download at the Documents page) of an IEC 61850 substation automation system (SAS) that should be valid for the companies in the group
• Lead the technological gap between now-available IEC 61850 systems and the desired final picture
• Improve efficiency and optimise IEC 61850 deployment

The E3 group went public:

Click HERE for their group Website.

Tutorial of the 5 IEC 61850 Gurus in Sydney was very successful

After the Meeting of the IEC TC 57 WG 10 (Core IEC 61850) in Noosa (Queensland, Australia) four IEC 61850 Gurus of the Working Group 10 went down to Sydney to meet another IEC 61850 Guru to conduct a 3 day Tutorial and hands-on Training on 07.-09. March 2011.

The tutorial was a great Success! 48 attendees from 15 Utilities (!!) and 5 from 4 other companies attended the four half-day sessions in four parallel streams from Monday noon-time to Wednesday noon-time.

After this event it is likely that Australian utility engineers are ahead of the market - in most countries utility engineers are - more or less - watching the vendors commissioning and "turning on" TURN-KEY substation automation systems in their substations!! Usually - to my observation and experience - utility engineers have NO IDEA what they got delivered. Australian utilities are quite serious in getting deeply involved in specification, engineering, system integration, ...

More to come.

Some photos from the WG 10 meeting and from the event in Sydney:

Professor Valeriy Vyatkin (Auckland) presents IEC 61499 ...

Convenor of WG 10 (Christoph Brunner - one of the 5 IEC 61850 Gurus)

Alex Apostolov (another IEC 61850 Guru) discussing requirements for definition of Logic in IEC 61850

Reflections during the excursion in the Noosa River Everglades

The Gurus (Christoph and Alex) reflecting the quality of the Native GOOSE ... Wine

The other 3 Gurus discuss and enjoy during the reception (from left):
Joerg Reuter, Rod Hughes and Karlheinz Schwarz

System Control & Supervision - and Peopleware

The Washington Post reported on October 23, 2010, that the lack of training could cause very severe situations in the energy transmission and distribution systems. The recent event of the San Bruno gas pipeline burst (that killed several people) has "speed up adoption of a rule to ensure that workers doing similar jobs at companies across the country are well-trained ...".

"If somebody is not trained, it could be very dangerous. If they don't properly respond to an alarm situation, it can cause an explosion. It can
cause leaks. The damage could be very large."

"Although pipeline companies boast an impressive array of technology, he said, at many such firms, "there is a lack of recognition that people
have to operate that equipment.""

My experience after training of more than 2.000 people form more than 500 companies and more than 50 countries with regard to advanced communication and information systems using IEC 61850 is this: There is a very huge lack of recognition that people have to design, engineer, commission, operate, diagnose, and maintain these comprehensive and complex systems in substations and many other applications. More often I see the following: Utilities purchase turnkey systems - without having their own technical people (from the field with many years experience in the power system) consulted or trained to work with the new technology. One year later when the warranty is finished, they have to take over the full responsibility for the whole system! Good luck!

Impact of IEC 61850 on System Engineering, Tools, Peopleware and the Role of the System Integrator: more on that issue in a [paper] and on [slides]

Click HERE for the full report in the Washington Post.

Customers talk Much to Vendors - Less to Standardization Groups

The IEEE PES Power & Energy Magazine stated recently "in my view" that "At a recent stakeholder workshop on smart grid interoperability standards sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NISIST), the electric utility industry accounted for less than 15% of the total attendance. If the industry continues to be severely underrepresented as the process moves to the various standards development organizations, the utility industry will have little say over the final standards as they are developed without its significant input. ... For all of these reasons, it is critical that electric utility knowledge and vision
are a part of the standard setting process."

On the other hand Dr. Lemmer (Siemens Power Automation) stated at the CIGRE in Paris event end of August 2010 with regard to innovation that "our customers tell us where we are going" (see video at 05:35 minutes).

I hope that more utility domain experts will get involved - one was or the other - in the future standardization work. Especially in IEC TC 58 and related groups. As well as in the various "users groups" - that are in fact "vendors groups". Dear Utility Domain expert, you are welcome to join one or the other group ... which also brings you around to see many airports ... and meet a lot of Smart People!

Click HERE for the full text of the "time to speak up! get involved in developing smart grid standards".