Electricity Today T&D Magazine

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...