Do we need a business case for IEC 61850?

The typical reasoning was: The business case for IEC 61850 is process bus. Process bus is not necessarily an issue for distribution substations. So where is the business case for distribution substations?

As a first observation I must say that in the early years of IEC 61850, while the standard rapidly got accepted for communication between bay level and station level - what is typically called station bus - it took us quite some effort to develop the business case for a process bus and to convince the end customers of such a solution. So, I was rather surprised to see that some utilities believe process bus is the one and only business case for IEC 61850.

Are the cost savings associated with a process bus solution (mainly the reduction of the wiring) - the only driver to introduce IEC 61850? If we look at the history, obviously not. I assume that more than 4000 substations are now built worldwide using IEC 61850 and none of them are yet using a process bus. While I am certainly convinced that an IEC 61850 based process bus will further reduce the overall life cycle costs of a substation, there are other reasons to move to IEC 61850.

Fact is that all manufacturers are now moving to IEC 61850. And I recently heard a statement from a utility that they want to be proactive and not reactive. That means for a utility - start early enough with the introduction of IEC 61850, lead the change and develop the expertise to define a solution that suits your business needs. And the stakeholders that have to be involved in the process of identifying the requirements and developing the solution are not just the operations and the design and construct departments. It is the complete utility, from design, communication and SCADA over commissioning, testing and IT to procurement and asset management. IEC 61850 provides many aspects beneficial to utilities. A key point is:

• The reduction of the engineering effort
• The ability to build more substations in less time

It is certain that this requires some investment. The engineering environment needs to be established but IEC 61850 engineering process with a standardized information exchange between engineering tools and the standardized semantic data models contribute significantly to the reduction of the engineering time and the reuse of existing designs independent from the products used. This is beneficial during the whole life cycle of the substation. Configuration information is available in electronic and to a large extend device independent manner and can easily be reused for replacement as well as for extensions of the substation.

With the extension of the scope of IEC 61850 beyond the substation,  smart integration into the power automation network will be another reason to go for IEC 61850. This will enable not only a seamless communication from control centers to substations and between substations, but it will also enable seamless engineering - data points that have once been captured and will be available across the power automation system. Thus, this will provide even more efficiency for the overall engineering. These are just a few examples of how IEC 61850 can improve your substation life cycle and reduce costs.

The seamless communication to the control center however, is not yet reality and in many cases, as utilities have to rely on the existing communication infrastructure between the substation and the control centers. To facilitate the migration, specifications supporting the connection of an IEC 61850 substation to the SCADA protocols used today have been developed. IEC 61850-80-1 describes the mapping between IEC 61850 and IEC 60870-5-101 / -104. Further, IEEE 1815.1 is currently under development to define the mapping between IEC 61850 and the DNP (IEEE 1815) protocol. Both specifications support the engineering process as well so that the engineering of the gateway can be automated as far as possible.

Thus, introducing IEC 61850 is more than just about a business case with process bus and is certainly beneficial for all kinds of substations. There are many new and exciting activities surrounding  IEC 61850 standardization and I will talk more about them in my next column. 

Biography:
Christoph Brunner graduated as an Electrical Engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1983. He is President of it4power in Zug, Switzerland. Before, he worked as a project manager at ABB Switzerland Ltd in the business area Power Technology Products in Zurich where he was responsible for the communication architecture of the substation automation system. He is Convenor of working group (WG) 10 and member of WG 17, 18 and 19 of IEC TC57. As a member of IEEE-PES and IEEE-SA, he is active in several working groups of the IEEE-PSRC. He is International Advisor to the board of the UCA International Users Group.