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Production March, 2024 The Digital Substation By Stephen Armstrong
virtualization. At least that is what an increasing number of utilities are envisioning as they explore the opportunity for in- creased virtualization in substa- tion design. In this future, there would be a significant reduction in the hardware used in substa- tions. Instead, tasks will be car- ried out on cloud servers, mark- ing a noticeable shift from the current reliance on extensive racks of hardware. The appeal for utilities is
T
the significant cost reduction for substation design and engineer- ing, reduced usage of copper wiring, and the ability to easily replicate substation designs for future expansions. “Consider that today’s sub-
station can have 200 or more in- dependent [hardware] boxes each performing a dedicated task,” says Jeremy Anderson, senior vice president of product development at NovaTech Au- tomation, a leading U.S. provider of automation and engineering solutions for power utilities headquartered in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. “That’s a tremen-
he future of power system substations may be rede- fined by the application of
dous amount of wire to pull, hardware to maintain, and it continues to become more and more congested. In a virtual dig- ital substation, two or three servers run everything.”
Automating Substations With a vision for an intelli-
gent grid of the future that is adaptive and resilient, requiring less hardware and leveraging more virtualization, the utilities industry has formed the Virtual Protection and Control Alliance (vPAC) to explore how to do this. The focus is to accelerate the cre- ation of a standards-based, open, interoperable and secure archi- tecture to host protection, au- tomation, and control solutions for power system substations. NovaTech is one of its over 20 member organizations. “From our standpoint, we
wanted to help define the future of substation automation,” says An- derson. With this in mind, NovaT- ech has spent the past year creat- ing a virtual version of its Orion Substation Automation Platform to run on any server. The system is hosted on a machine known as a hypervisor and servers powered by Intel CPUs.
The company’s flagship
product, the Orion is a communi- cation and automation processor that can connect to nearly any substation device in its native protocol, perform advanced math and logic, and securely present the source or calculated data to any number of clients in their own protocol. According to Anderson, there
is a coordinated push by some large investor owned utilities in the United States and globally to move to what is being called the “digital substation.” Still, not all utilities are ready to pull the plug on the traditional substation de- sign quite yet. Cost savings is a leading driver of utilities’ interest in virtualization. Recent supply chain challenges are also increas- ing the appeal of hardware agnos- tic solutions.
Designing the Virtual System In creating the virtual
Orion, NovaTech wanted to en- sure the system functioned iden- tically to its current hardware- based system. “The biggest challenge was
taking a system that was devel- oped over many years as embed- ded software for purpose-built
hardware and make it run on any server,” says Anderson. He adds that in some ways
it was easier than initially thought. “The virtual Orion looks and operates the same as every unit we have sold,” says Ander- son. “It just happens to run on hardware that we didn’t build.” Anderson adds that NovaT-
ech was intent on ensuring the customer experience was unal- tered. “We are still in the early days of the deployment of the vir- tual digital substations,” says An-
...the focus is to accelerate
the creation of a standards- based, open, interoperable and secure architecture to host protection,
automation, and control
solutions for power system substations.
derson. “There are some early adopters, but I anticipate that we are at least five years away from broad-based market adoption.” However there is an oppor-
tunity to solve a more immediate issue in substation environ- ments. As more IoT devices are installed in utility distribution systems, a single virtual Orion on a server could be used to col- lect and manage data from thou- sands of sources. When all these devices must be hardwired, it can take several racks of Orions to collect all the data. A similar scenario could
drive the use of the Orion beyond the substation environment and into any enterprise where thou- sands of devices are collecting data.
With cloud computing and
virtualization changing the con- tours of many industries, mo- mentum continues to build be- hind virtualizing more of the work of a substation. The blue- print for tomorrow’s power sys- tem substation has yet to be fully written, but it is only a matter of time that we will see more virtu- al environments emerge through the collective expertise of indus-
try stakeholders. Contact: NovaTech, LLC,
1720 Molasses Way, Quakertown, PA 18951 % 484-812-6000 Web:
www.novatechweb.com r
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