EXPERIENCE GOT FROM PILOT IEC61850-BASED
SUBSTATIONS
Shuchao Wang,Yadong Feng, Wenlong Wang
NARI-RELAYS ELECTRIC CO LTD, Nanjing 211100,China
Abstract: With the development of the IEC 61850, utilities are beginning to implement substation
automation systems (SAS) that are based on this new international standard. While in order to ensure
the maximum performance enabled by today’s technologies, various limitations have been imposed by
utilities for new standard based migration, moderation or installation projects, and thus several kinds of
IEC61850 applications and corresponding compliant products appeared as a result of different bus
structure requirements in substation. This paper discusses the two popular bus structures implemented
in all kinds of projects, one is a traditional bus structure without digital process bus, and the other a
more advanced bus structure with digital process bus. To implement a process bus in traditional
substations with conventional primary equipments, some new devices such as Merging Unit (MU) and
Circuit Breaker Controller (CBC) are introduced to act as IEC61850 interface. In particular, some of
their technical implementation features will be explained in detail. As far as substation automation is
concerned, based on the facilities served by the new protocol, two great benefits can be achieved,
which are its unique free information exchange model and its advantages for distributed intelligent
application. In the end, several typical application projects with above features are given and discussed
by the author.
Keywords: IEC 61850, Bus Structure,Process Bus,Interface Equipment, Merging Unit,Circuit Breaker
Controller, Information Exchange Model, Distributed Intelligent Application.
1.
INTRODUCTION
Today new substations are built with state-of-the-art secondary equipment. It is of great importance to
know what their overall purpose is during the whole lifetime of the substation. With the technology
development in hardware, software an