As the leader of Hitachi Energy's North American pre-sales team, Steven has a wealth of knowledge. His tenure at Hitachi Energy and his involvement in the development of the IEC 61850 standard, the foundation for modern digital substation technology, gives him a unique perspective on the industry's transformation.
Here, Steven explains how the digital substation is revolutionizing grid management, improving reliability and supporting the integration of renewable energy sources.
Q. Hi Steven. Tell us about yourself and your job.
Sometimes I feel like I've done it all. I started working at Brown Boveri Corporation (BB of ABB) before Hitachi Energy acquired the power grid division. In my 40 years, I've been there and done it all.
We are actively promoting the value of our new portfolio and solutions to help our customers navigate this digitalization journey, especially around protection, control, automation and the digital substation. The underlying technology is based on the open communications standard IEC 68 50. I was one of the original members of the working group that developed this standard in 1998, and it was introduced in 2004.
Now, 20 years later, the benefits of this open-based standard that allows customers and utilities to integrate multiple manufacturers on the same technology are being felt around the world.
Q. How is Hitachi Energy contributing to sustainability, especially with regard to grid integration?
We work on many different aspects when it comes to sustainability: My focus right now is North America, but there is a big push towards green energy across the United States.
We have some very large wind projects, large utility-scale offshore wind projects, and we're currently in the process of rolling out some of those and supporting our efforts here.
The integration of renewable energy, whether it's solar or wind farms, has an impact on the traditional grid. Add to that the fact that we now have all-electric and EV infrastructure. The grid is changing. The traditional grid of 20 years ago has been transformed by the incorporation of renewable energy into the distribution portion of the grid.
Traditional substations simply won't be able to keep up if they continue to operate the same way they have for the last 20 years, and that's where digital comes in to help transform the utility space with a smaller footprint, fewer wires to the systems, and the ability to bring these systems to the utility space quickly.
When it comes to sustainability, we're working at every touchpoint. And a smaller footprint means less truck runs, less copper wires, the control rooms that contain these digital substations and secondary systems can be cut in half. From a sustainability standpoint, it all adds up.
But what really matters is how we help transform today's power grid to accommodate PFPB, wind and EV infrastructure.
Q. Compared to traditional substations, what are the key technological advances that make the digital substation a more sustainable and efficient option?
New technologies are emerging and we have new products. For example, the SAM 600 is a process interface unit that allows for greater compactness because functional integration is key. Getting more devices into fewer boxes goes a long way to supporting that.
And from a grid automation perspective, we also have the analytics to be able to see the health of these key assets. We need to be able to do predictive maintenance on transformers and have indicators that tell us that a transformer is starting to show signs of degradation or potential maintenance needs, so we can catch that before it goes live, which would cause a very long outage, which may or may not be sustainable from a sustainability perspective.
How can the digital substation help utilities manage modern, increasingly complex network demands, especially with regard to the integration of renewable energy sources and the rise of distributed energy resources?
Q. How does the digital substation help utilities manage modern, increasingly complex network demands, especially with regards to the integration of renewable energy sources and the rise of distributed energy resources?
Whether it's a digital substation or distribution automation, the ability to have telemetry and know what's going on in the grid is really important, such as sensors that are installed in PV plants to know if reactive power is needed, and then working with those PV plants to run inverter-based resources to provide reactive power from a stability standpoint.
If you look at the interconnection, a traditional utility distribution substation has a transformer that's designed for power to flow in one direction, but now you have five PV plants feeding into that transformer. What happens when that gets overloaded? That's where distribution automation comes in.
We can monitor that transformer in a utility environment and look at the power flow going in the reverse direction and determine if the transformer is aging, overheating, or going into a fault condition, and we can initiate these control schemes on the PV plant to shut it down for that period of time until the transformer returns to normal.
These are some very interesting types of applications that can be deployed to help utilities protect their traditional assets in a changing landscape.
Q. Can you provide some specific examples or case studies of how investments in digital substations have significantly improved grid reliability and performance for utilities?
One of the main values behind a digital substation is the latest technology and advancements in protection and control arrangements. For example, our Relion 670 series is a vast improvement over those introduced 20 years ago. By moving to a more digital approach, we can get rid of all the copper wires, so from a reliability standpoint, these systems have fewer components, fewer potential points of failure, and therefore better availability. Availability numbers need to be 99.999, which means that the system can withstand two to four hours of downtime per year.
Again, advanced solutions and the whole concept behind digitalization allows you to consolidate functions, reduce boxes, reduce points of failure, so you can see the communication and have all the information.
These systems are not designed to withstand 20-30% increases like they were 20 years ago. The grid is near capacity, and any failure there would have widespread impacts on the grid. From a reliability perspective, utilities are certainly under pressure to keep the power flowing, and now the added complexities of renewable energy throw another kind of challenge at utilities.
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