IEC 61850 multivendor station and process bus substation design

This paper presents the experience on how Entergy Transmission Engineering Group started the IEC 61850 effort together with collaborators such as vendors, research institutes, utility companies, and standard committee. The project was initially started with the intension to learn about the technology and had gradually evolved into an open platform testbed for multivendor interoperability of their Intelligent Electronics Devices (IED), which eventually had gained support and interest to start a pilot project to deploy a parallel IEC 61850 process bus system into one of the substations in New Orleans - Joliet Sub. This paper will share the goals and the design of the pilot substation, Joliet and future design concepts of Entergy's next digital substation.