Converting field recorded data to information: New requirements and concepts for the 21st century automated monitoring solutions Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • Automated monitoring of power systems has become an imperative due to two major developments that characterize the 21st century electricity grid: a) large scale deployment of intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) has created huge amount of data - recorded either continuously or at the time when IED recording is triggered by an event such as disturbance or fault, and b) the power system loading has increased to the point where it operates close to the limits, which requires much better monitoring capability than what is available today to make sure such operation does not create undesirable consequences such as cascading failures. Fully aware of the challenges the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has developed standards for event monitoring and reporting, which will assure the bulk electricity system is reliable, adequate and secure. To fulfill NERC and/or internal requirements for improved monitoring utilities have started deploying advance solutions that enable automated collection of field data, extraction of information and distribution of monitoring reports so that the utility staff can respond to the events expeditiously. The deployment examples illustrated in this paper are aimed at demonstrating various deployment strategies that are possible with such solutions: substation, distributed and centralized-based processing. The substation processing requires installation of a PC that serves as the integration hub which collects recorded files from all substation IEDs, converts data to information and creates event reports that are sent to the groups that need them. The distributed solution retrieves IED records and passes them to a location such as protection office, operator control room or maintenance canter where further processing is done. The centralized solution collects all the data to a centralized database, extracts information and sends it to the users per request. To illustrate the above concepts several hardware and software solutions are developed and deployed in the field: circuit breaker recorder, automated analysis of circuit breaker recorder (CBR) data, automated analysis of digital protective relay (DPR) data, automated analysis of digital fault recorder (DFR) data, automated integration of substation IED data, automated handling of user interfaces. All the solutions are implemented using advanced hardware and software concepts that allow the recorded data to be synchronized and time stamped utilizing receivers for Global Position System (GPS) of satellites. Time stamped data is communicated through variety of modern communication media such as wireless, optical fiber and high-speed coaxial cable links. Handling of software applications is through advanced JAVA programming, and user interfaces deploy latest advancements in the web browsers and graphical user interfaces. Practical issues such as cyber security, implementation steps and personnel acceptance are addressed as well.

published proceedings

  • 43rd International Conference on Large High Voltage Electric Systems 2010, CIGRE 2010

author list (cited authors)

  • Myrda, P. T., Kezunovic, M., Sternfeld, S., Sevcik, D. R., & Popovic, T.

complete list of authors

  • Myrda, PT||Kezunovic, M||Sternfeld, S||Sevcik, DR||Popovic, T

publication date

  • December 2010