We’ve been active this summer attending various engineering related conferences and technical committee meetings.
IEC TC57 Meetings – Mackinaw Island, Michigan
IEC TC57 WG10 (responsible for IEC 61850) had a rare opportunity to have a joint meeting with its colleagues at WG15 (Security) & WG19 (CIM). It was beneficial have an insight into the other working groups, and is an effort that will no doubt assist in the unification process. Although it was a mission to arrive there, the island itself was immaculate and well worth the journey. Special thanks to Herb Falk for organizing the meetings!
In terms of the IEC 61850 (WG10) discussions, there were plenty of hot topics including:
1. IEC 61850-90-11 Task Force: Worked on draft copy to standardize on the internal logic of the relay, as per IEC 61131-3 and PLCOpen.
2. User-Feedback Task Force: Worked on user feedback register, which initially focuses on EPRI’s 61850 IOP
3.IEC 61850-90-3 & 90-14 Task Force: Worked on draft copy for Condition Based Monitoring and FACTS
4. IEC 61850-90-16 Task Force: Contemplated the fundamental need to have software tools available for wide area system/IED update capabilities. In other words to push/pull system maintenance files (IED files) files to a number of IEDS in a batch process.
5. IEC 61850-7-500 (7-5): Resolved comments from the most recent draft copy of IEC 61850-7-500, which provides guidelines in terms of the use of logical nodes and other 61850 concepts. IEC 61850-7-5 focuses on the fundamental principles, whereas 7-500 focuses on the specific use cases. Use cases under development are Auto-Reclose, Switch-On-To-Bus, Paralleling Transformers, and a Reverse-Blocking Scheme.
6. IEC 61850 SCL & Sub-Functioning: The computer programmers were present – propeller hats and all – in which case they made some tweaks to the latest addition of the XML schema, as well as raising some fundamental modelling issues within the sub-function discussions. Great job by Christian Frei for moderating these sessions.
CIGRE Conference – Calgary, Alberta
CIGRE & AltaLink did a fantastic job hosting this years conference in Calgary, which drew approximately 350 people from across the globe. It was a unique forum to share exciting new research and developments, raise issues and challenges, discuss future direction, and network and exchange with leading professionals from an international community of expertise in power systems.
http://www.cigre.ca/#
Europe IEC 61850 Conference – Prague, Czech
Even though this was an inaugural event, it went off without a hitch and we look forward to attending next year’s conference. It was interesting to see the contrast in IEC 61850 priorities between Australia, Europe and Canada. We may be thousands of miles apart geographically, but many of the concerns were consistent across all areas, such as cyber-security and GOOSE isolation/restoration. The key differences are how many are pursing (or planning on pursing) their 61850 initiatives. Some are putting the pressure on the vendors and/or IEC community while they sit idle, whereas others are going into their internal closet and closing the door hoping to develop their applications with internal resources. Others – usually the successful ones – are involving all three. They are the ones playing in the lab; consulting OEMs & system integrators on practical use cases; while ensuring they have adequate representation within the IEC, so they have a finger on the pulse in terms of the direction that the standard are taking.
http://www.iec61850-europe.com/index.html
All in all it’s been a great summer of learning and listening to some of the world’s experts in Smart Grid and IEC 61850 applications. If you’re interested in hearing more about any of these topics/initiatives, we’d be happy to discuss them in more detail and see how they relate to your business model.
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