IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - July/August 2019 - 54

figure 6. An event analysis using PMU data.
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near-real-time stability monitoring
subsynchronous oscillations and active dampening
advanced islanding resynchronization and black start
short circuit capacity
system disturbance monitoring
fast voltage stability assessment for transmission
corridors.

A DER Management System
The future grid will have a high penetration of DERs, and
substations will have a critical role in managing them. Valuable DER data, control, and optimization will be part of future
substations, especially for utility-grade resources. DER data
from substations will play an important role in visualizing and
planning DER deployment: understanding, managing, and
planning an increasingly complex DER portfolio; calculating
DER capacities; and understanding what mitigation steps need
to be implemented, often in the substation, to reduce negative impacts involving voltage stability, grid capacity, reverse
power flow, unintentional islanding, and more.
Substations of the future will likely consist of some functionality to optimize and control DERs. This will include the
ability to supply critical data for real-time analysis and control algorithms. The substation, through a DER management
system running as an application (see Figure 7), will provide
input to market operators and market players to understand
constraints and capacities of the grid to accommodate DER
functionality, ancillary services, and market contribution.

Summary
There are great benefits to making substation control systems fully digital, including reduced design and construction
costs, more efficient use of engineering and technician time,
and lower maintenance costs. However, as shown in the
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example applications, the greatest value is the ability to adapt
to new operating requirements in a timely and reliable manner. In the future, the substation will be the key control point
and interface that manages the impact of new resources and
new operators. With a digitally enabled substation, it will be
possible to quickly roll out new applications, such as APM to
maximize the usage of physical assets, artificial intelligence
and machine learning to help analyze and respond to system
events, wide-area monitoring to provide situational intelligence for both the transmission and the distribution system,
and DER management to integrate the resources that will
make the grid stronger and more resilient.
Another advantage of the digitally enabled substation is
that it will increase efficiency and reduce nonvalue added
activities. The biggest gain in productivity is in the much
lower number of trips to substations for configuring, maintaining, testing, and troubleshooting devices. System monitoring, for example, APM means monitoring as opposed
to testing. Rolling out a new application, such as advanced
islanding, is simply sending the application software to the
substation edge device via communications. The configuration of a DER management system can be done remotely by
connecting to and automatically configuring control devices.
The focus will move toward how to operate the power system more effectively and away from how to configure, maintain, test, and update devices and systems.
There are some considerations regarding the implementation of a digitally enabled substation. The substation edge
device and the digital substation must be designed with cybersecurity in mind. This requires capabilities, including secure
firmware in the substation edge device, signed applications,
authentication of application sources, and the ability to roll the
substation edge device back to a known safe state. There are
also two types of interoperability to consider: 1) the ability of
july/august 2019

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - July/August 2019

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