Reducing engineering costs using IEC 61850
BY ADAM GAUCI, Schneider Electric
As substation automation is moving towards software environments based on the International Electrotechnical Commission’s substation automation standard, IEC 61850: “Power Utility Automation”, the engineering process is becoming more complex. Consequently, a greater portion of the capital expenditure (CAPEX) budget is used to develop new—or upgrade existing—substations, especially in interoperable, multi-vendor environments. This can be attributed to the increasingly complex automation schemes which are now possible, and the learning curve associated with having to learn a multitude of different configuration tools currently required during the engineering process of a substation automation system.
One problem today is that many vendors of substation systems have tried to adapt proprietary methodologies into their native tools for configuring IEC 61850 communications within a substation. This leads to incompatibilities between devices and configuration tools from different vendors. It also increases the potential for incorporating...
