Smart Secondary Substations – Technology Development and Distribution System Benefit [WG 2014-1]
Secondary substation is getting more and more strategic in MV and LV networks to achieve service quality improvement due to its key role in power flow monitoring, DER management and network automation and control.
It implies a significant activity on secondary substations investigating new solutions for technological improvement of concrete structures, MV and LV equipment, MV/LV transformers, protection system, remote control devices and auxiliary components.
These goals involve the exploration of existing functionalities of apparatus actually used by utilities, to create a new substation model with reliable power components, high performance protection schemes, efficient flow monitoring system and trusty communication infrastructures, thus optimizing the overall control of distribution network in order to:
- manage energy flows and voltage profiles according to load and DER needs
- ensure fast reconfiguration after a failure
- identify and pursue efficiency opportunities.
With these goals in mind all devices and their features must be integrated into a global architecture of MV and LV network control, communicating with a central system that manages information and allows remote operation on them. Devices’ features must be apt to work in different secondary substation topologies.