Digitalisation of Substations and Business Prospects

Discussing the present infrastructure, power experts and substation managers talk about opportunities to implement digital substations across India. They also discussed the critical challenges and threats of the substation grid systems.

India is the third largest consumer of power in the world, and digital substation can enhance the energy demands by improving efficiency with digitalisation. Moreover, with Indian government’s push towards increasing the share of renewable energy towards the power sector, digital substation can strengthen the grid connectivity with the substation for a better and improvised power transmission.

Digitalisation of substations gaining momentum
Digital substation is actually a term used to define electrical operations being smartly managed between distributed intelligent IEDs interconnected with the communication networks. Digitalisation significantly enables the data transmission from various substation devices.

According to K N Sreekumar, Business Unit Head-Digital Grid Business, Smart Infrastructure, Siemens India, the momentum of digital is picking up slow, especially when we look at the digitalisation speed happening in the station level within the control root. But I expect it to gain more traction in the coming time.” He further feels that we must look for ways to enhance the performance, and how predictive maintenance can play its part. From a TBCB perspective, we need to maintain a substation for 25 years, and analyse on translating the cost for 25 years into benefits. It’s a collaborative effort by all of us as this would drive the speed.

According to Sandip Maithy, AVP – Design and Engineering, Sterlite Power, we don’t have any critical installations that is completely digitalised. “As the concept is emerging, people are trying to put one or two ways under the digital merging units and concept. So, the concept is picking up but not that way we are thinking that SCADA could have been done in 2002 or 2003.”

Automation and digital measuring solutions for power substation
Digitalisation of the substation itself is going to play a major role. “However, there are issues like interoperability and costing, we must also look into the entire lifecycle cost. At the same time, we need to understand on where does the utility stand today. Utilities are still struggling with the cyber security issues, says Chhaya Bhonslay, Chief – Technical Services (T&D), Tata Power.

Competition is impending requirement everywhere, so, we are expanding our own systems other than the TBCB jobs. When the regulation commission comes in to the picture, competition also comes in for auctions, bidding and other processes; here absence of built-in interoperability the process becomes difficult and rigid.

For example, if I am planning a digital substation with future expansion, I cannot be stuck with a single vendor as this will make the utilities life miserable. Unless these issues are addressed and resolved, the adoption speed will remain constant and our dependence in OEM’s will continue.

“So, a collaborative competency building needs to speed up together. It should be leveraged to increase our profits by giving the services at the set price. Rather, we must look at how one can collaborate with the utilities to develop these competencies”, Chhaya explains.

Reducing operational cost and maintaining efficiency
We already have digitalisation in place. Having less component in the circuit will definitely increase the operational efficiency; further, the control cable is reduced by 60 – 70 percent. Noting the same, Sandip says that today, all the power player or the utility are getting paid for the kind of services we deliver to the nation. So, if I am able to stabilise and retain the power supply / transmission after the power tripping, by appropriate troubleshooting process, nothing can beat that.

Adding more to the explanation, Sandip says “Digitalisation reduces the time for O&M activities and increases the efficiency. When we look at the lifetime cost, then probably it can help us, also even the people and the users will be keen to have data lessons in place for better understanding.

Sreekumar on the other hand adds more to the conversation. He says “The digital protection devices have
substantially enhanced our ability to operate and protect the equipment faster.” Because substation automation helps us prevent outages by knowing about topics in advance by having records of events and managing the substation proactively.

It further facilitates in attaining accurate and fast analysis of faults in location in grid operation, using the
information generated via real-time monitoring and other value-added application. So, integrated engineering can reduce time of operation of a substation by up to 30 per cent, as process data is integrated to the substation control system, for efficient management.

Challenges in digitalised substations
Discussing the challenges, Sandip explains about two critical bottlenecks –

1. The overall cost is not so lucrative – In today’s scenario, every penny is counted, and now becoming
   divisive into business, so we have to first win the bids from the Ministry, then you have to execute with that
   cost limit. This will help or enhance the possibility to go far on the substation on the cost part.
2. Second being the interoperability – nowadays, what challenges we all are facing is, if I’m having the component
   from make A and having component in will to make B for my future expansion that interoperability is not yet getting through. So, if we focus on these two parts, and probably with the intervention from the government, if
   some standards can be come up, or maybe from the IC guideline, that different make A, B, C can interoperable
   in their merging units or the IDs, then probably some benefits come up, and people will be focusing on that.
   So that’s the area we need to focus upon and it will help further grow in this journey.

Interoperability will happen over time. Talking about manufacturers, need to make sure that everything within the manufacturer is interoperable by merging unit works with production device, automation system, IoT interface etc. Interoperability on these factors would be the first to address the present condition by creating a stability.

“When the idea of automated substations came in, nothing was interoperable. The communication between a protection device to the automation system was completely on proprietary standards. Later came standards like IEC 103, IEC 61850 which are more of a plug and play type. Today, IEC 61850 is expected to be interoperable”, says Sreekumar.

The first thing we have to do to make sure that the technologies implemented at least in a vendor-specific manner, vendor agnostic will come over time. And, to be competitive enough, you shouldn’t just compete for the substation but for each device, only then we can compete.

On this note, Chhaya talk about the challenges with respect to cybersecurity, asset management support,
especially developing the expertise, grid operations support. The digital substation is going to support the grid operations, and hence I think –
• Utilities have to develop an expertise in integrated engineering.
• There is a version management issue of same suppliers with different IEDs.
• Similarly, the routine maintenance of the digital substation, as well as the complete equipment is important.

With respect to engineering and execution, the vendor has to look into the interoperability of their merging units and IEDs. The vendors and utilities have to collaboratively develop the expertise and with the mutual collaboration, slowly the complete utilities can move towards digital substation.

Balancing cost and efficiency
Sometimes, we need to look at the benefits of digitalisation in a comprehensive manner. We must focus on improving assets life by installing digital sensors in transformers; and look for ways to extend transformer’s lifecycle by few more years. We must find ways to factor these benefits in our calculations purely by incremental savings from fiber cable to copper cable as it that can be even with less digitalisation.

Here, Sreekumar suggests, all the planner, OEMs, utilities and the regulators should come together and have a discussion and view it in a holistic manner. As this could only justify the terms of benefits.

The amount by having data driven decisions like some said, even a 10 minutes improvement in availability can make a huge change and that is how we have to start looking and that’s what I think would tilt the scale in terms of justifying the economic benefits.

Whereas, as per Sandip’s views, every nation today develops numerous smart devices and merging unit; so, if we want a cost advantage platform in place, our selection of units, choice of parts should be from multiple developers. We need to have productive discussions with the manufacturer, utilities, integrators and policy
makers to make it a reality.

Talking about efficiency and operational efficiency for utilities, Chhaya highlights that basic awareness at the ground level and data accessibility to the operator is live. We need that level of awareness at every level. This makes predictive and periodic maintenance easy.

The way forward
We will still have a lot of centralised production of energy, which means a lot of substations will continue to exist. The digitalisation of these substations is essential in managing the energy more efficiently. It is not only that we have to produce energy from renewable sources, but we also have to manage it efficiently to be able to avoid wastage of resources, by reducing the need to build up redundancies or by making sure that unplanned outages are eliminated.

“Looking more into the details of digitisation and automated technologies, its comprehensive benefits and other impending requirements is a mandate to push this idea forward”, adds Sreekumar.

“The agency implementing regional substation and the utility who are taking it forward, need to obtain an understanding and let it sit for some time to mature. This will further develop a mindset regarding digitalisation as it might be the way forward” explains Sandip.

“With respect to businesses, as a utility, we must realign our O&M practices while transitioning from conventional substation to modern substation, and from modern to digital substation” Chhaya concludes.

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”Vendors and utilities should develop an expertise by leveraging technologies and move towards digital substation.” – Chhaya Bhonslay, Chief – Technical Services (T&D), Tata Power.

”The digital protection devices have substantially enhanced our ability to operate and protect the equipment faster.” – K N Sreekumar, Business Unit Head-Digital Grid Business, Smart Infrastructure, Siemens India.

”To become digital, we need to have productive discussions with the manufacturer, utilities, integrators and policymakers.” – Sandip Maithy, AVP – Design and Engineering, Sterlite Power.