IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - July/August 2019 - 49

Substations can be continually updated to meet new operating
conditions and operating requirements without having to perform
complete upgrades or recommission impacted equipment.

and wide-area applications. This includes distribution automation applications, such DER management, fault detection and isolation, microgrid integration, and connections to
cloud applications and utility system operations. One resulting function of this device is essentially to be a communications interface and data concentrator for wide-area applications connected through the substation.
The benefit of this architecture is the ability to develop
applications that run as software services. Any application,
such as asset performance management (APM), wide-area
monitoring, and DER management, can be independently
developed, quickly prototyped, and rapidly type tested.
These new applications can then be loaded into the substation edge device without requiring a firmware upgrade or
impacting services or applications already working the
edge device. New functionality through new applications
can be rolled out automatically and remotely to all substations quickly and with little risk. Therefore, substations can be continually updated to meet new operating
conditions and operating requirements without having to perform complete upgrades or recommission
impacted equipment.

Why Do We See This Direction?
Utility operators will interact and cooperate with potentially
thousands of new devices, including residential solar inverters, solar farms, ac and dc EVs connected to the distribution
system, and battery storage. There will also be new types of
distribution operators, including microgrid owners and virtual power plants. The new operations system must quickly
model and instantly represent new control devices of any
type, at any location, and in multiples of thousands of such
devices. At the distribution level especially, the substation
will be the key data concentrator for this type of interface.
As the power system becomes more unpredictable and has
less hierarchical control, better situational awareness is needed.
The substation becomes a key source of data for situational
intelligence for both transmission and distribution. Wide-area
monitoring systems must integrate PMUs from transmission
networks and the micro-PMUs increasingly found on distribution networks. Beyond situational intelligence, monitoring
systems will be necessary to operate the substation better
to maximize the usage of power system equipment, such as
transformers. APM will, therefore, be a mission-critical function to ensure that power system components can dynamically

Asset
Performance
Management

Control Plane
Security Services
Data Collector
Data Services

Resource
Management

Distance
Protection

Domain U

Domain 0
Real-Time
Container
Engine

Bay Control

Real-Time Domain

Container 1

Container 2

App

Bins/Libraries

Container Engine

Real-Time
Container 1

Real-Time
Container 2

App

Bins/Libraries

Hypervisor
Hardware

figure 2. A substation edge device concept.
july/august 2019

ieee power & energy magazine

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - July/August 2019

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