The Power of IEC 61850: Bus-Transfer and Load-Shedding Applications

The new communications technology and the newly developed International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard IEC 61850 [1], for generic object-oriented substation events (GOOSE), bring many advantages to industrial protection and control applications. Some of the applications benefiting the most are those associated with the bus-transfer and load-shedding schemes, together with more beneficial communication-assisted schemes, like zone interlocking, fast bus trip, and arc-flash reduction. Some intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) are equipped with more than one high-speed Ethernet channel to transmit or receive hundreds of discrete and analog values. This offers two very big advantages over the copper-wired IEDs: 1) a single pair of network cables, either copper or fiber, can substitute for a big number of standard copper wires and 2) using two or more network channels provides very good data exchange redundancy and hence higher reliability. The savings from substituting a large number of copper wires with a communication medium like Ethernet copper twisted paired cables, or a pair of fiber-optic cables, can be easily calculated.