“Tomorrow, there is going to be a blackout across the entire east and south coast of Australia that will take 48 hours to be resolved.”
Just kidding of course. But while that is very unlikely to happen, I would like you to think about the possible implications. People in hospitals relying on backup generators that could fail, your parents suffering from heat stress due to lack of air conditioning, the majority of the Australian economy coming to an abrupt standstill.
Despite efforts of introducing more energy efficient equipment it is rather unlikely that the demand for electricity in the years to come will shrink significantly. However expanding the congested transmission networks to places where there is an increase in demand, is a time and cost intensive task. The expected growth in the use of renewable energy generation poses a further challenge with generation sites being offshore or in remote areas. Also distributed energy resources need to be considered, like small wind farms, photovoltaic power plants and battery storage.
And while this article is not about climate change, we should factor in possible climate changes as future challenges, with droughts affecting generation of hydro plants and higher temperatures putting a bigger load on the network.
More and more sensitive equipment being used, results in an increase in power quality demands. The highest level of availability and reliability is expected and simply assumed as an absolute minimum requirement. Yet there is an emphasis to further reduce overall costs while still meeting these demands.
To keep up the pace with the ever faster changes and these challenges, the grid needs to become smarter.
Read more in our paper that was presented first at the ANC Cigre SEAPAC 2013 conference in Brisbane, about how zenon can be used as a CRAS (Centralized Remedial Action Scheme) as one step towards WAMPAC (Wide Area Monitoring Protection And Control).
"CRAS are a cost effective solution to improve the reliability and security of the electrical transmission and distribution networks. Our test results clearly demonstrated the versatility and flexibility of zenon. It was successfully demonstrated that a CRAS scheme can be added to a zenon SCADA system, converting it into a powerful real-time automation platform."Pascal Schaub, Managing Director, D.T. Partners, Australia |
“As the hype and excitement around the smart grid turn into reality, we present a paper that shows an easy way how the availability and stability of distribution and transmission networks can be increased, using existing infrastructure and zenon Logic, with an IEC 61850 server with GOOSE and MMS.”Mark CLEMENS, Senior Consultant, COPA-DATA Headquarters |
„Before I did the first test I had reservations if it would be a reasonable idea to start the load shedding application together with the SCADA on the same PC instead of using dedicated hardware. I wasn’t sure if it would be fast and reliable enough. But the results of the measurements simply exceeded our expectations.”Ursula Piela, Senior Consultant, COPA-DATA Headquarters |