Digital Substation is an engineering publication focused on IEC 61850 automation, protection systems, and digital grid intelligence.
IEC 61850 interoperability testing is under way in Utrecht, where equipment and software from multiple suppliers are being integrated into common protection, automation and control applications. Participant reports now cover functional protection tests, network configuration from SCD files and virtualised protection.
What IEC 61869-9 actually requires, and where the boundary lies between "still synchronized" and "no longer synchronized". The article unpacks the "2 → 1 → 0" misconception about SAMU/NCIT behavior on PTP loss, the link between clockClass, timeTraceable and SmpSynch, and how a complex protection function should react when one of its source streams loses synchronization.
UK Power Networks' Constellation project replaces bay-level protection relays with virtualized software on substation computers, using IEC 61850 process bus for local protection and R-GOOSE over 5G for wide area coordination. The first site is operating in Maidstone, Kent, with five more planned across South East England.
Most digital substation projects are single-vendor, single-site proofs of concept. RTE — the operator of France's 2,600-substation transmission grid — decided to do something harder: build a fully digital, multi-vendor PACS from scratch, act as its own system integrator, and scale it across the entire network.
This white paper explains how PTP can be used in substation automation systems to overcome incompatibilities and shortcomings of existing time distribution systems.
Open-source world is rich with interesting projects. Today we present a project which offers a possibility of PTP implementation for further studies. Project is called PTPd (PTP daemon) and it offers implementation of the Precision Time protocol (PTP) as defined by the relevant IEEE 1588 standard. PTP Version 2 implements IEEE-1588-2008.