The Smart Grid (SG) – Substation Integration Benefits

By: Dalibor Kladar (KladarD@ieee.org)

The intelligence of power system (PS) is concentrated in HW/SW products for substation automation and integration. Those products common name is - Intelligent Electronic Devices (IED). The IED is the ‘building block’ of SG*.

The IED data should be combined, transferred, analyzed, reported, stored and accessed in real time by many applications - ranging from individual IED applications to system-wide disturbance analysis applications. Those applications serve the following users:
· operators,
· maintenance crews,
· protection engineers,
· engineering groups,
· planners,
· business decision makers etc.

The IED data integration is done automatically. The reports of automated data analysis and system models are adjusted to serve those various users at the substation and control center levels.

Benefits

The IED data integration provide following benefits:

· improves the quality of service and customer relationship by responding to the PS interruptions promptly;

· increases the operator’s ability to monitor and control the PS during normal, abnormal, and emergency conditions by providing reliable and appropriate real-time data;

· expands PS efficiency by helping to reduce losses;

· assists maintenance and protection crews by offering more reliable, meaningful, and timely records of the operating history;

· improves PS analysis and planning by providing increased access to past and current operations data and applications;


*Transmission Management System (TMS), Distribution Management System (DMS), Energy Management System (EMS), Outage Management System (OMS), Generation Management System (GMS), Distributed Renewable Generation (DRG).