Smart Grid Interoperability Panel & Grid Interop

Smart Grid Interoperability Panel and Governing Board were elected and put in place to kick-start the ambitious smart grid project. The US Government grant for smart grid of 3.4 Billion were announced last month. The stimulus money, the SGIP and the Grid Interoperability Conference and the Smart Grd Cybersecurity report and the grands announced together with an equivalent or more contribution from Utilities really have put on schedule the Smart Grid roll out in US.

The Smart Grid support as part of Stimulus and the enhanced interest in the stakeholder community is pushing the standards initiative like never before. The time consuming and often diverse and duplicate efforts of various standards bodies is suddenly finding their activities being brought under a common umbrella. Always standardization that is driven more by regulation and government interest of a bigger goal brings about faster and better results, compared to efforts that are driven by the manufacturer community and perceived needs of a given segment. The Grid Interop agenda and meeting is a good indicator on how under the Smart Grid umbrella most of the protocol bodies and stakeholders participated and discussed common issues, which earlier would have got discussed at separate forums.

The Smart Grid after effects are being seen in the R-APDRP program in India, where one hears about how this program can lead to a future Smart Grid. The Smart Grid definition being so broad, wide and vague, it is very difficult to re-orient a program that has very specific objectives as in India, to drive towards a future of Smart Grid, without specific thought being put from a goal perspective into the program. However CIM / 61850 and Cyber Security focus will surely help this program

IEC 61850 and SmartGrid

The more one reads of the smart grid efforts in US and other parts of the world, and the high paced standardization efforts within the NIST / IEEE / IEC system, it looks more and more that IEC 61850 will get submerged within the smartgrid movement. Smartgrid gives hope of adding lot of value and technology to the Industry and maybe what was required to get the power industry to re-invest in technology and innovation of a different kind after so many years in slumber.

However is it good for IEC 61850 itself, it is hard to say, for now one sees all the major people within the TC57 and the 61850 working group getting overtly involved with smart grid standardization efforts and the product manufacturers and utilities, the key drivers of IEC 61850 in Europe, trying to grapple with how to make their pie out of the smartgrid, it looks more and more apparent that IEC 61850 innovations will have to for some time be sub-servient to the Smartgrid bandwagon effect, and when the din dies down, we will either have IEC 61850 standing tall and ready for more, or it getting swamped in a new wave of technology, regulatory and standardization efforts that makes it struggling to stand on its own.

IEC 61850 Year 2008 – A Year That Was

IEC 61850 had a great year 2008. The expansion of the standard in terms of end customer adoption and vendor support has been stupendous. This has been further enhanced by the new developments within the standardization body to extend the boundaries of IEC 61850. Also, there has been interesting off-shoots in terms of adoption of IEC 61850 in different types of applications outside of it's conventional or intended domains.

The announcement by Siemens that it has commissioned more than 1000 IEC 61850 substations and more than 50000 IEC 61850 devices sold talks a lot about how the market for IEC 61850 and the adoption of the standard has expanded globally. The fact that IEC 61850 and the new substation technologies provided the developing countries a way to bypass one generation of technologies and the expanding market making the products cost competitive have been some of the interesting aspects of the market development.

Listed below are some of unique aspect's of the evolution of IEC 61850 in 2008:
1) ICE 61850-7-420 in smart grid vehicle – Electric cars are basically battery storage systems that could act as a distributed power source to the grid on demand. These systems can be managed using the IEC 61850-7-420 DER standard. http://www.smartgridvehicle.org/
2) IEC 61400-25 announces the formation of an user group in september 2008. The IEC 61400-25 standard enables communication basis for monitoring and control of wind power plants. The standards extends the work done under IEC 61850 and extends it to wind power domain.
3) CPRI opens an Independent Interoperability Test Lab and Certification Lab with UCA approval in Bangalore India.
4) STRI opened an Independent Interoperability Test Lab for IEC 61850, to support Nordic Utilities and Industries with the standard and adoption. http://www.stri.se
5) IEC 61400-25-4 approved as an International Standard. The other parts already standardized included IEC 61400-25-1,2,3 and 5.
6) IEC 61850-80-1 approved as an International Standard. The IEC 61850-80-1 Technical Specifications provides guidelines for information exchange between IEC 61850 and IEC 60870-5-101 and IEC 60870-5-104 protocols.
7) IEC 61850 and IEC 61499 – There exists a case for integrating the Function Block support of IEC 61499 into the IEC 61850 domain, so that distributed intelligence maybe possible.
IEC TC57 WG 10, responsible for IEC 61850 to consider adopting IEC 62439 (Industrial Communication Networks: High availability automation networks) redundancy concepts.
8) IEC 61850 and IEEE C37.118 Integration – There are standardization discussions and works on looking at integrating IEC 61850 and IEEE C37.118 so that WAMS systems and IEC 61850 systems can exchange information seamlessly.