Choose simplicity for a better digital substation design

Digital substation process bus-based solutions provide multiple benefits that can be used to improve personnel safety around high-voltage equipment, reduce electromagnetic interference challenges, and decrease substation construction costs. To realize these benefits, special attention must be given to the selection of the fiber-optic network architecture used for a process bus implementation. Network architecture directly affects the amount of engineering required to design, commission, and maintain a digital substation. This paper outlines the benefits of using digital communications between primary substation equipment and the protective relays installed in the control house. The authors discuss different communications network architectures and their associated protocols and then introduce a point-to-point, EtherCAT
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-based digital substation technology. Simple and secure, this new solution is easy to implement, eliminates the need for external time synchronization, requires no network engineering, and is easily scalable to support traveling-wave protection and the megahertz sampling requirements of future digital substations.