The Substation of the Future: Moving Toward a Digital Solution

The substation of the future will move away from the current single-purpose, hardware-based protection and automation systems and replace them with a software-defined control system running virtual services: a digitally enabled substation. This is necessary to enable substation systems to adapt to the new reality of an increasing amount of inverter-based distributed energy resources (DERs) changing operating requirements and affecting feeder power flow, voltage, and protection functions. Wind power, solar power, battery storage, and electric vehicles (EVs) may be connected anywhere to the grid. Unless operation is coordinated, the geographic concentration of DERs by different owners could potentially result in a negative impact to the existing grid.