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.