A Paradigm Shift in Substation Engineering: IEC 61850 Approach

With the emergence of Ethernet based technology, the industry demands for substation communication protocols that are multivendor, of high speed and built mainly for substation automation. IEC 61850 are here to stay to provide methods of developing best engineering practices for substation protection, integration control, monitoring, metering and testing; all integrated in one. But with the plethora of offerings, the end users ought to be clear in their requirement to optimize the resources and cost. This calls for developing clear specification and design basis. With IEC 61850 the typical real time data are pre-modeled in an object oriented manner that are designed for fast processing. The logical nodes, containing these data, can communicate among themselves to form logical functions. The speed of above communication can be set as per the priority of the function to be executed and so it is not necessary that the datasets to reside in same devices for execution of a logical functions. For example to introduce a fifth harmonic block in transformer differential function, it need not reside in same IED. With such offerings to make it gives opportunity to design engineers to optimize the resources and design an efficient and integrated protection system.This paper is about understanding the potential of IEC 61850 and developing specification for a typical IEC 61850 based substation automation. The specification intends to bridge the gap between the vendors and end users.