Impact of IEC 61850 on Power System Protection

IEC 61850 is a new international standard for communication networks and systems in substations that has a significant impact on the developments in power system protection. It allows the implementation of high-speed peer-to-peer communications based applications, as well as distributed protection solutions using sampled analog values. The paper describes the principles of different IEC 61850 communications based protection functions and analyses the factors that will affect their performance. It also discusses the advantages of distributed applications based on high-speed peer-to-peer communications compared with conventional hard wired schemes. Examples of comparison testing are presented at the end of the paper