Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Manitoba Hydro (Canada) Goes IEC 61850 for 100+ Substations

Cooper Power Systems announced on April 12, 2010, that it is working with Manitoba Hydro and its system integrator, Virelec, to develop fully IEC 61850 compliant substations. The project is intended to modernize, automate and integrate over 100 substations, following the IEC 61850 standard.

Click HERE for the Cooper press release.

Manitoba Hydro, a utility headquartered in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada), was looking to replace their current Substation Automation System (SAS) which is a discrete RTU and PLC-based control and metering architecture with an integrated IEC 61850-based architecture. This initiative follows a trend that is observed throughout the world, as the benefits of technologically advanced IEDs and IEC 61850 get more interest from utilities.

A comprehensive 4-day training in 2008 for some 25 of their best engineers helped the Manitoba Hydro "IEC 61850 Team" to write the system specification in a way so that the potential vendors and system integrators got a very detailed and comprehensive specification taking IEC 61850 into account. The responsible engineers wanted to write a document that covers all crucial requirements with regard to the standard. This is contrary to many specifications today that spend one sentence: "Communication: according to IEC 61850."

Click HERE for the White paper from Manitoba Hydro and Cooper.

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