E4S Alliance – Integrated, fully digital, smart secondary substation concept

The “Edge for Smart Secondary Substation” (E4S) Alliance was formed by distribution system operators and manufacturers with the objective to define a new concept of the secondary substation based on a standard platform specification. This platform will support hardware and software components with standardized interfaces allowing components to be interoperable and interchangeable, allowing rapid and flexible deployments at scale. Renewable energy resources and electrification of heating and transport require changes in the management of electrical distribution networks as well as grid flexibility to take advantage of all energy resources of production and consumption at MV & LV network level. The monitoring and operational systems will need expanding in the acquisition of data from both medium voltage and low voltage parts of the distribution network, and in the computing power to perform forecasts and analyses. As the electrical network is geographically distributed, it is appropriate to consider a distributed computing network where applications are executed within substations. In computing terms this is known as edge control. To avoid system complexity, improve security and limit solution cost impact and change of technology seems necessary. Software defined technology is already proven on other applications and can be a solution for future-proof requests.