All through electrical substations change continues to surge.
For many years, utilities routed energy from centralized sources. Now they’re orchestrating energy technology throughout various and distributed sources, together with renewables like wind and photo voltaic. Substations are also navigating extra advanced calls for as we electrify transportation akin to EV–with a rising phase of consumers consuming and producing electrical energy.
What is going to it take to evolve substations to handle operational, customer support, price effectivity, and environmental objectives?
The reply is sustained funding in substation automation and digitization to create an clever and safe electrical supply system that depends on communications and data know-how. Cisco calls this the New Digital Substation. In contrast to conventional operations, the New Digital Substation handles extra sustainable, distributed, and variable power provides in addition to fluctuating demand all in actual time.
Constructing on greater than a decade of expertise supporting substation automation, Cisco lately printed the Substation Automation 3.0 Design Information. This Cisco Validated Design (CVD) builds on earlier options supporting SCADA operational programs – and it stands out for 4 new and differentiated capabilities. Within the quest for higher flexibility, effectivity, and safety, these have develop into must-haves within the New Digital Substation.
Should-have #1: Resilient, Digital Operations
The business is transferring to attach extra gear utilizing commonplace, open communications which are designed to digitally function substation gear. These purposes require way more from the community than the standard SCADA primarily based purposes: low-latency, extremely resilient and synchronization companies.
We designed the Cisco Catalyst IE3x00 and IE9300 Rugged Collection Switches and the Cisco Catalyst IR1100 and IR8340 Rugged Collection Routers to help substation automation purposes primarily based on IEC 61850 – the worldwide commonplace that defines communication protocols for clever digital units inside substations. These units additionally help different substation communication protocols and may combine with a bunch of legacy {hardware}.
Should-have #2: Huge bandwidth, small footprint
Cisco’s newest substation structure options upgraded routing and switching options. The IR8340 {hardware} and IE9300 switches present higher bandwidth together with extra options in smaller bodily footprints. As such, they’ll help the next amount of linked units and purposes whereas addressing objectives for operational effectivity and operational price containment.
The IR8340 is a router, swap, firewall, and exact timing module. The stackable IE9300 helps high-density fiber ports to resiliently join numerous substation gear whereas offering visibility of the substation units and communication. Each additionally act as cyber safety brokers for the substation and have edge compute functionality.
Should-have #3: Simplified community administration
Traditionally, grid operations groups haven’t wanted IT or community administration abilities as they depend on “one and accomplished” deployments. As operations develop into more and more digital, utilities must handle and monitor the networks to keep up uptime.
The Substation Automation 3.0 structure reduces the necessity for community experience. It incorporates Cisco DNA Heart and Cisco Software program-Outlined WAN (SD-WAN) applied sciences – which centralizes, simplifies, and automates community deployment and administration. Utilizing these instruments, a smaller crew can handle units with zero-touch configuration and upkeep.
Should-have #4: Cyber safety; visibility, safety and compliance
As a part of any neighborhood’s vital infrastructure, substations should be hardened towards cyber-security threats. Cisco’s Substation Automation 3.0 structure upgrades cyber safety capabilities together with Cisco Cyber Imaginative and prescient to offer higher visibility and safety throughout the total ecosystem of linked units.
This visibility and safety make it potential to flag suspicious communications and defend the gear earlier than they compromise grid safety. Enhanced safety and administration additionally assist handle rising necessities for cyber certification (e.g. NERC/CIP), together with the necessity to show that important operational processes and procedures are in place.
The brand new power ecosystem is quickly taking form and electrical substations should preserve tempo. Think about how the Substation Automation 3.0 Design may also help.
As with each Cisco Validated Design, we’ve assembled and examined all of the elements of the structure. Now we have validated that they handle resilience and interoperability objectives and we’ve examined their potential to help core use circumstances, together with integrating with key vendor units and purposes.
Study extra
Get an introduction to the brand new Digital Substation in our Substation Automation Resolution Transient. For particulars on designing and implementing the Digital Substation, see our Substation Automation Design and Implementation Guides.
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