Experiences in piloting virtualised centralised protection and 5G-based wide area protection in real live distribution network in UK

The rapid growth of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) and the requirements of uninterrupted power delivery are challenging the existing protection and control principles. More and more protection, control and automation devices are added to the system to manage the complexity, and it is thus more challenging to manage and maintain the system. Virtualisation has been recently diffusing also to power system protection applications and has been seen as an attractive solution for managing the complexity and costs. Virtualisation decouples software from product specific hardware and makes it possible to run applications from multiple vendors on the same hardware. There is, however, still very limited experience in virtualised protection in a real substation environment. This paper introduces the Constellation project, which aims to develop and demonstrate virtualised protection and control solutions and presents the two piloting areas where the developed virtualised protection solutions are being trialled. The developed solutions are currently being piloted in the south of the UK on a real 33 kV grid substation and DER sites.