Digital-IT Need
The decarbonisation of energy systems has resulted in significant changes in electrical power grids, due to the wide-scale connection of decentralised renewable energy resources. Future electrical power grids need real-time capable control and monitoring systems to ensure stability under increasingly complex conditions, as well as metering systems, to ensure fair trading of electrical energy.
New standards in the IEC 61869 series (on instrument transformers) have helped to address the digital communication of new electronic instrument transformers, as well as SAMUs (which are digitisers for analogue instrument transformers). The IEC 61850 standard series (on communication protocols for intelligent electronic devices at electrical substations) is also under revision and adding new definitions for routable SV data in order to establish a truly real time wide area measurement system. These new standards have helped to boost the transition from traditional analogue instrumentation towards new digital substation instrumentation technology, both on transmission and on distribution level. However, to be able to fully support this change, standardisation bodies need to further develop their standards to include the metrological aspects of digital substation instrumentation.
Currently, there is a lack of calibration methods and metrological infrastructure for new digital substation instrumentation e.g. SV enabled equipment. Therefore, new metrology-level facilities are needed to be able to test and to validate the performance of such intelligent electronic devices (IEDs). Further to this, solutions for higher sampling rates and PTP timing required by the new standards (for digital substation instrumentation) need to be developed.