The UCA International Users Group (UCAIug) hosted the latest interoperability test for IEC 61850 at EPRI facilities located in Charlotte, NC, USA during the week of September 23-27, 2019.
There were approximately 150 people that participated, split between twenty-four (24) participating companies and eighteen (18) witnessing companies from Austria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Korea, Poland, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, and other countries.
The lens of the interoperability focused on an integrated application consisting of a control center and a substation with two SCL (System Configuration Language) projects: one for high voltage and the other for low voltage.
SCT file exchange was used to create information exchanges between the projects.
There was a major emphasis on using the integrated application to represent a digital utility based on Sampled Values from merging units.
There were six merging units split across HSR and PRP process bus networks that exchanged information between each other in order to provide information to protection relays that supported the other technology. Station Bus was PRP.
PTP Grandmaster, boundary, and ordinary clocks were distributed throughout the network with synchronization being provided from Station Bus to Process Bus.
Other test areas were cyber security, protection scheme testing, simulation, maintenance isolation, and time synchronization. There were several “firsts” achieved:
- Secured layer 2 GOOSE (encrypted and signed) were exchanged
- EC 61850 Key Distribution was tested
