By Phil Kreveld
A partial report on substation monitoring and control—an important subject at the Australian Protection Symposium, held in Sydney from 17-19 September.
This correspondent’s playful reference to himself fell flat amongst the erudite swans, that is the protection engineers, gathered at the 2024 Australian Protection Symposium where GOOSE—or ‘generic object-oriented substation event’—substations were a focal point.
GOOSE is the acronym for substation protection described by IEC standard 61850. As we steadily march towards higher and higher concentrations of renewables in transmission and distribution networks, IEC 61850, because of its flexibility, is growing in importance.
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Yet the facts indicate that as yet only a small number of Australian substations use this open-standard technology. How important is GOOSE as our distribution networks are becoming more complex because of distributed energy resources? Instead of white swans, contemplate black swans—those unexpected, disastrous events and the measures that can be taken to ameliorate their impact on vital infrastructure.
We are confronted by weather events and technology failures that can bring down electricity networks and although that has always been so, the transition to renewables adds new dimensions to guarding security of supply. A simple example, voltage ride-through for asynchronous energy sources, will do as failures here can bring down networks.
One of the most dramatic black swan events was the South Australian blackout of 28 September 2016—due in part to no voltage ride-through of wind turbine generators. This particular failure might not have been preventable by more flexible protection systems but it presents a salutary example of the value that enhanced protection systems can achieve if we design them so as to minimise the effects of ‘black swans’.
Basically, GOOSE is an open standard for IED—Intelligent Electronic Devices—that are addressed by switches in data networks such as Ethernet. Hard-wired protection relays, the traditional protection technology in substations is replaced by programmable devices that are at home in our increasingly digital world. Of course, there is an unsurprising mindset against change—or change for change’s sake.
However, GOOSE is very much at home in the renewable world of today’s distribution networks. The work done in California in combining the advantages of IEC 61850 with IEC 2030.5, the standard relevant to the control of solar inverters, could benefit us here.
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Inverter control, given the challenges facing distribution networks in voltage control during periods of high insolation could be of material advantage, for example in volt-watt and volt-power factor control. Integration with IEC 61850-based substation monitoring and control with IEC 2030.5 for distributed energy resources could provide for flexibly programmable dynamic operation envelopes.
The digital world brings with it ‘bad actors’, but also amusing exchanges as well as informative presentations. Regarding the reliability in the face of communication threats aspects of digital systems the presenter asked the questioner to remove his phone from his pocket; “You trust that, don’t you?”
Inherent system reliability can be provided by parallel redundancy, and as to bad actors, tightly controlled access to programming of IED, as presented by NOJA Power Switchgear. Parallel redundancy measures were presented by Endeavour Energy.
