IEC 61850 Today

Under its Technical Committee (TC) 57, IEC is developing normative standards (the 61850 series) to support open-systems-based communications for electric power systems. The formal name of this body of work is "Communication Networks and Systems for Power Utility Automation". These standards will enable easy assimilation of components into an interoperable communication system to support "smart distribution system" operations by standardizing the object models and the protocols involved. The use of international standards will eliminate the need to do custom engineering of the communication system in every instance and use a "plug and play" process instead. The end result is more cost-effective and rapid development of the communications systems for smart distribution systems, and eventually for entire power systems.

The development of standards under TC57 is performed by volunteer working groups (WG). The 61850 series of standards is aimed at the communication needs for real-time operations of smart power systems. It also manages other related standards work, including work on standards for power system business enterprise (WG 14) and standards for information security (WG 15). Overall coordination is the responsibility of WG 19.

Object models (information models of equipment) in the 61850 series are broken down into a structure of logical nodes. An object model can be thought of as the building and the logical nodes as its bricks. This approach is by intentional design. The intent is to be able to reuse the logical nodes wherever possible as the modeling of more device types is added to the 61850 series. This approach achieves efficiency in adding new device models and consistency in naming model attributes throughout the entire series.

The portion of IEC 61850 for substations has been completed by WG 10 and released. Major vendors are now offering substation equipment that conforms to 61850. Utilities worldwide are increasingly specifying it for substations, and substations providers are installing turnkey 61850 substations. This standard is the lynch pin for an expanding series that will addresses interoperability of the entire power system. Maintenance and updates for the substation standard are being performed by WG 10.

Early Benefits of IEC 61850

The benefits of using IEC 61850 were shown for an actual European utility substation case-study example. A primary benefit in the near term is reducing the engineering time necessary to configure the intelligent electronic devices (IEDs). The case study shows that there was an order of magnitude reduction in these engineering time requirements for the case presented.

Figure 1 illustrates automated configuration enabled by 61850-compliant devices via self-description and automated engineering tools. Each device vendor provides a Substation Configuration Language (SCL) file for use with these tools. The devices can then be configured from office computers. The same type of process could be used to update simulation models from IEDs and servers in the field. New device settings could be sent to the field from the engineer's computer. In the future, this two-way automation will enable efficient and accurate DER deployment and integration into active distribution management systems.