Advances in Telecontrol and Remote Terminal Units (RTU) for Power Substations

The current demands of electrical energy have forced the utilities to improve the reliability and efficiency of power supply. With the current trends most of electrical energy needs to be generated from renewable energy sources and distributed to Large Power Users (LPU) and Small Power Users (SPU) using smart substations as a secured point of supply. Power system infrastructure is the one of the largest infrastructure across the world; hence it requires radical protection, control, monitoring and effective communication between substation devices. Substation devices need to be monitored and controlled constantly to ensure reliable and safe operations. Substation automation technologies have been in the centre of the constant power system innovation for the past years, which resulted to the development of numerous protocols and standards such as Modbus, Distributed Network Protocol (DNP3) and IEC61850. These protocols and standards are used to facilitate communications between substation devices and control centres. The interconnection of smart control centres, substations and distribution network is called smart grid. The purpose of this document is to define the technical advantages of smart substations and IEC61850. This paper also discusses the challenges related to Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) applications in protection messages and suggested solutions. Since IEC61850 is a communication standard that contains numerous protocols suites, then this paper uses P145 protection relay to simulate the scenario where device virtual outputs are used to report statuses as Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) data.