Edge Devices, Sensors, Cloud for High Voltage Switchgears

Cross-country high voltage power grids are worldwide the base of all critical infrastructures. A modern industrial society cannot function without a reliable operation of these power grids. The increasing energy demand in our highly integrated mobility-, logistic- and economical system leads to significantly extended requirements regarding their capacity, flexibility and reliability. These requirements have already led to an increasing application of the digitalization for the high voltage equipment used in substations. The measured or calculated data are centrally stored in cloud-based solutions or station servers. Edge devices, Edge Computing and Edge Analytics increasingly build a supplement of these systems. The major advantage of this edge computing-based approach is the rapid interpretation of the status data that is much faster than with legacy systems. A selection of the most important intelligent components for control and monitoring will be presented in this paper. The data of these systems could be processed in real time to further improve the flexibility and operational reliability of high voltage power grids. A cloud can be used as a recording medium or to process data which do not need real time data processing.