Friday, July 8, 2011

Use of IEC 61400-25 to secure access to key O&M data

Vattenfall (one of the big European power utilities) plans to use IEC 61400-25 (an extension of IEC 61850) for operational and maintenance (service) applications.

Here is the conclusion of the paper:
”The IEC 61400-25 series of standards provides the means to get open and easy access to key O&M data [operation and maintenance data]. This data is a necessity for making the evaluations and analysis needed to improve operation and maintenance of the wind power plants. The paper has shown how the standard can be implemented and what benefits are associated with its use.
The standard does not restrict nor mandate specific customer-supplier roles, but provides a solution that supports the whole range of business cases where the different actors can cooperate. Both the customer and the supplier can benefit from IEC 61400-25 through decreased costs for data access and system integration. Time and money can instead be put on the development of applications, functions and methods that increase the performance of the wind turbines.
Vattenfall considers standards such as IEC 61400-25 to be an important part in the development of the wind power business. The IEC 61400-25 series of standards is therefore part of Vattenfall technical requirements for future procurements.”

The same is true for any other energy resource feeding electric energy into the grid – at any voltage level. The renewable resources and – more general – distributed energy resources (DER) are key for the future electric power delivery system. A government funded project in Germany (EUMONIS: Innovationsallianz zur Entwicklung einer Software- und Systemplattform für Energie- und Umweltmonitoringsysteme) is looking for accessing, storing and using information from the sheer unlimited number of power resources in the near future: PV, CHP, hydro, wind, flying wheels, … One objective is to have information about the status and availability of the resource in a central database, in order to operate and maintain the “distributed Power Plant”. This seems to be one of the crucial challenges in the years to come.

Click HERE to access the complete Vattenfall paper [pdf].
Click HERE for the website of EUMONIS [German].

Did you know that IEC 61400-25 covers also Condition Monitoring needs?

Wind turbines - Part 25-6: Communications for monitoring and control of wind power plants - Logical node classes and data classes for condition monitoring

Click HERE for the preview of part IEC 61400-25-6

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