Wireless Light-Weight IEC 61850 Based Loss of Mains Protection for Smart Grid

Abstract

This paper presents a novel Loss of Mains (LoM) protection method based on IEC 61850 Manufacturing Messages Specification (MMS) protocol over wireless Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) based access point name (APN) mechanism. LoM or anti islanding protection is a key requirement in modern power distribution grids where there is significant amount of distributed energy resources (DER). The future Smart Grids are based on extensive communication capabilities and thus the communication based LoM approaches will also become dominant. The IEC 61850 standard based systems are gaining ground in the substation communication, and therefore, it is natural to expand this technology deeper into the distribution network. Using this standard for LoM protection, also enables some advanced approaches utilizing large variety of information available in the Smart Grid. There is a specific part of the standard, IEC 61850-7-420, which defines logical nodes (LNs) suitable for this purpose; but, there are no available devices applying this part of the standard yet. In this research, a light-weight implementation of IEDs (Intelligent Electronic Devices) is developed using a low-cost open microcontroller platform, Beagle Bone, and an open source software. Using this platform, a wireless LoM solution based on IEC 61850 MMS protocol has been developed and demonstrated. This paper introduces object modelling according to IEC 61850-7-420 defined LNs and an implementation applying direct client server MMS based communication between lightweight IEDs. The performance of the wireless application using the developed platform is demonstrated by measuring the message latencies.

In this paper, a novel LoM protection concept is proposed based on the standardized communication solution brought by IEC 61850 and specific LNs for DERs defined in IEC 61850-7-420. A light-weight implementation of an IEC 61850 based IED is developed in order to reduce large overhead information and complexity of the standard. In addition to LoM function, the developed solution has the ability to monitor DERs status. The available monitoring information can be shared among various distribution management systems (DMS), enabling distributed decision approach for various purposes.