Abstract :
This issue focuses on industrial power systems, which is certainly a dominant area for our standards activities in the IEEE Industry Applications Society (IAS). In his last column, the author introduced the concept of a planned series of workshops on dc power systems and standards, which will begin in 2014. Here he uses this column to provide additional details on this topic. He concludes that protection and control of dc power systems could be the technical area that offers the greatest opportunities and challenges and is therefore most in need of standardization. Any power system must be safe and reliable, and standards play a key role in meeting these requirements. Protection system optimization has evolved over our long history of ac power usage so that we do an amazingly effective job with safety and reliability; any dc power system must at least maintain our existing very high performance levels in these areas. It almost goes without saying, but any power system must serve its intended purpose, and that means it must be controlled. Like protection, our control techniques for ac power systems have matured over several years, and we, as a technical community, have a great understanding of the issues and an outstanding ability to operate our ac systems to meet our needs. Any future dc system must at least maintain this level of performance, and certainly the intent is to improve upon it.
