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Engineering and Condition Monitoring in Digital Substations – an initiative to implement digital substations in the Norwegian power grid

Abstract

The primary goal of the digitalization of substations is making them smaller, safer, and smarter. Substation digitalization is expected to impact all parts of the substation lifecycle, from design, engineering, installation, testing, operation, renewal, maintenance to dismantling. Implementation of IEC 61850 process bus allows safer and more compact substations designs, with new, compact Low Power Instrument Transformers (LPITs), less copper cabling and smaller control rooms. Moreover, the digital substation framework facilitates the integration of intelligent condition monitoring functions for primary components. However, before the digital substation benefits can be harvested, there are challenges that need to be addressed. These include availability, quality and costs of sensors, cybersecurity, interoperability, ability of IEC 61850 to support new functionalities and network requirements. This paper presents expectations and practical experiences with digital substations, including examples of integration of condition monitoring sensors. The paper is divided in two main Paper ID 10980 Session 2022 B3 / Substations & electrical installations and B5 / Protection & automationPS3 / Integration of intelligence in substations
2 sections. The first section presents initial findings on benefits and challenges with digital substations in terms of HSE (health, safety, and environment), reliability and time and costexpenditure. The experiences are drawn from seven digital pilot stations in Norway as well as a laboratory platform in the ECoDiS project1. The second section presents two examples of intelligent condition monitoring of primary components in digital substations. The first case deals with vibration anomaly detection in circuit breakers using a machine learning algorithm. The second case concerns the integration of sensors for power transformer temperature monitoring and making the sensor data available through IEC 61850 without compromising critical functions in the digital substation automation system

Category

Academic lecture

Client

  • Research Council of Norway (RCN) / 296550

Language

English

Author(s)

Affiliation

  • Unknown
  • SINTEF Energy Research / Energisystemer
  • SINTEF Energy Research / Elkraftteknologi
  • Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Presented at

CIGRE Sessions 2022

Place

Paris

Date

28.08.2022 - 02.09.2022

Organizer

CIGRE

Year

2022

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