Nourshing Legacy Substation with Digital Substation

Abstract

Digital substation technology coverts larger conventional substation into small, compact, cost effective, reliable, sustainable and improved control plus monitoring. In general, as compared to conventional substations the digital substation needs lesser space for smaller trenches, lighter trays for faster installation & commissioning easier access for maintenance. Digital substation reduces operating expenses (OPEX) budget. Digital substation is the one of the important aspects of modern electric grid, which needs to be more resilience to meet growing energy needs like electrical vehicle charging stations, extreme weather condition impact on renewable energy generation, distributed energy resources and prosumers. Real time visibility of fluctuations in generation and load management is highly required in current power generation pattern due to distributed energy resource/generation. Real time awareness of grid to the operator reduces the outage impacts by eliminating the faulty area on time there by avoids cascading events and reduces the number of customers get affected by outages. Larsen and Toubro (L&T) understood the need of the latest state of art digital substation technology to enable the future world to meet modern energy requirements and upgraded the existing conventional 33/0.415 kV and 11/0.415 kV substations in chennai headquarters (HQ) campus with Intelligent Electronic Devices (IED) using digital substation principles. L&T upgraded two substations not only to improve the monitoring and control capability in more intelligent way, but also to observe and analyze the challenges faced while converting conventional substation to digital and enhance L&T expertise on digital substation technology and prepare for future market. In this paper, we present the overall architecture, the lessons learnt during the implementation of digital substation project.