IEC61850 - Long way to go

IEC 61850 - Expanding Horizons

I do agree with the point that IEC61850 is and will be expanding its horizons especially after redefining its scope from Substations to complete power utility. With object models of Wind and Hydro already available & models of DER, standards of substation - substation and substation - control centre communication & mapping to web services are already underway, it will find a completely different focus. We can even expect revolutionary changes after the possibility of SCL to migrate to CIM to provide complete models needed for an EMS/ DMS systems.

But looking back, can we say that objectives of IEC61850 are completely achieved? Can we say the IEC61850 devices are completely interoperable? I feel that many vendor implementations had made this standard to deviate from its objectives. IEC61850 had provided options for private LNs, data & GGIOs for handling the situations which cannot be handled by the standard models. But now the scenario had reached in such a level that all the vendors are finding it much easy to have private models rather than going for the standard LNs, data or formats which will not help in achieving goals of a global standard. What is the purpose of the total interoperability, if a vendor IED cannot accept a GOOSE because there is a time stamp element? Are the test certificates and interoperability events helping any bit in providing true inter-operability? I feel interoperability still remains a key issue in migrating to IEC61850.

Another area I want to point out is the engineering efforts for IEC61850 which was hyped to be much less comparing with the native mechanisms. But if we notice the tools and systems available for engineering IEC61850 today, it is much oriented on the standards rather than looking from the users’ angle for the configuration. The user has to follow complete & elaborate 61850 standards to achieve the complete configuration. The second is the dependability of vendor tools for configuration is too high that each user needs to know all the vendor tools to achieve even simple configurations like GOOSE mapping. So the current scenario is such that IEC61850 has increased the engineering efforts rather than reducing the same, if one were to do an independent engineering based on the standard.

I personally feel TC57 WG10 had never foreseen such a huge welcome for IEC61850 which made the standard to have some limitation. The standard could have been made with Substation configuration language (SCL) completely compatible with the UML based CIM models. Today, with all implementations working well with the SCL & problems in migrating to CIM, it will require a long way for sending the model information to EMS/DMS systems.

In spite of all these problems, the high benefits in using the standard in comparison with native protocols, is driving the same a long way through. Tissues (technical issues) forum for IEC61850 had come good for the standard which takes users opinion and problems to address the same in revisions. Let’s hope new revisions can throw some light to these problems & come up with effective ways to ensure the interoperability.

IEC 61850 is expanding its horizons

Its been quite some time before i myself remembered about this blog. I have been busy creating another one at http://www.kalkitech.com/iec61850. However it did not look good that a blog can be in the company website and that is when i re-discovered this blog.

Anyway, much water has flowed since this blog was started. IEC 61850 has become a more complete standard, there seems to be a general consensus on IEC 61850 across the Atlantic, even though the adoption levels vastly differ. A great news in adoption has been the enthusiasm shown by developing countries like India / China.

However, the big news is the efforts at the standardization level to find new meaning and use for the standard from being a standard and model within the substation to expanding its scope, depth and breadth across substations and trying to integrate with old and new standardization efforts in other committees. However, i am sure there are differing views on this and hope to see some discussion on this here.