Virtual Protection Relay: Myth or Reality?

Not long after the advent of the large-scale power grid over 100 years ago, the need for circuit protection was soon identified and developed. While grid protection began with fuses and later shifted to electromechanical relays, for the last four decades the utility industry has used the most recent iteration of this technology: the microprocessor-based protection relay. Though protection relays have advanced in the last 40 years, operationally they have changed relatively little. However, as we move to a more digital power grid to support the ongoing transition to new forms of clean energy, a new and radically different protection technology is poised to take over: the Virtual Protection Relay (VPR). Virtualization is a mature technology that is deployed in IT environments in nearly every industry, allowing a single high-performance server to seamlessly split and share resources to multiple virtual machines running segregated workloads. However, the advantages of this technology are driving development of virtual versions of traditional operational technology (OT) workloads such as substation protection. Communications standards such as IEC 61850 are driving digital OT control networks, rather than the analog systems of the past. This paper focuses on introducing the reader, with little or no knowledge of VPR, to this new protection technology. Topics such as introduction to virtual protection relaying, hardware requirements for adopting this technology, lessons learned during a computer server setup, and test results comparison of a protection element with VPR and traditional protection relays will be covered.