Telecommunication services for utility owners

At Tampa Electric (TEC), substation automation (SA) means integrating electronic relays to serial ports on RTU data concentrators, picking off the data required for the control center and passing it up via legacy protocols. Separate communications are still required for protection engineers to access their relays directly for fault data and trouble shooting. The goal is to develop a LAN infrastructure in the substation to allow joint use of the communication path for both protection and operation of the power system. The microwave hub has been modernized to digital and augmented with fiber optic cable. The plan is to utilize the UCA2/GOMSFE protocol suites as proposed by the EPRI Substation LAN initiative. The TEC backbone will support a separate SA WAN from the corporate WAN. Access to the SA WAN and devices in the substation will be limited and controlled by firewall.