The power of IEC 61850 for bus transfer and load shedding applications

The new communications technology and the newly developed IEC61850[1] standard for generic object oriented substation events (GOOSE) bring many advantages to the industrial protection and control applications. Some of the applications benefiting the most are the ones associated with the bus transfer and the load shedding schemes, together with more beneficial communication-assisted schemes, like zone-interlocking, fast bus trip, arc-flash reduction, etc. Some Intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) are equipped with more than one high-speed Ethernet channel to transmit/receive hundreds of discrete and analog values. This offers two very big advantages over the copper wired IEDs: the first - a single pair of network cable either copper of fiber, can substitute a big number of standard copper wires, and the second - using two or more network channels provide very good data exchange redundancy and hence higher reliability. The savings on substituting a big number of copper wires by a communication media like Ethernet copper twisted pair cable, or a pair of fiber optic, can be easily calculated.