Piloting centralised services for remote digital substations

Digital substations with IEC 61850 process bus decrease the amount of needed wiring and enable various new functionalities. IEC 61850-9-2 sampled values (SV) are used to transfer measurement data and IEC 61850-8-1 Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) to communicate bay level breaker status information and control signals. This communication usually remains within a substation but with suitable communication infrastructure its usage can be extended also outside the substation. This paper describes a concept that utilises virtualisation technology to enable deploying various services on an edge server. The edge server gathers input data from different sources including the SV streams and GOOSE status information and also connects to cloud services. The system will be piloted in a real distribution network. The use cases included in the piloting are anomaly detection and fault forecasting and congestion management but the generic concept enables adding also other smart grid functionalities as a part of the full architecture.