Abstract:
Smart Grid technologies are changing rapidly with 100s of devices, multiple protocols, multiple buses, and hundreds of vendors raising interoperability issues, and generating massive amounts of data that needs to be stored and readily available for operators to quickly make decisions. One way to help address these challenges, is to push decision making and intelligence closer to the grid as well as use instruments that are able to continuously adapt to evolving requirements to achieve faster response times and better bandwidth utilization. This presentation is intended to introduce the distributed intelligence concept as well as discuss smart grid-ready instrumentation. A case study and demonstration will also be presented.
Speaker: Steve McAlonan, Business Development Manager, Energy Segment, National Instruments.
Product description: The NI Smart Grid Analyzer, an intelligent electronic device designed for substation and distribution grid monitoring and management.
Key features include:
- High-performance embedded platform
- High-speed data acquisition up to 833 samples/cycle
- High fidelity ADCs with 24 bits of resolution
- Scalable, modular I/O with built-in signal conditioning for voltage, current & digital I/O
- Multiple ports and multiple protocols for communication
- Dual-ethernet, multi-serial RS232 & RS485
- TCP/IP, UDP, Modbus RTU, Modbus TCP, IEC-60870, DNP3.0 & IEC-61850
- Rugged design with -40 to 70 C operating temperature
- Advanced, real-time signal processing & filtering
- Standard 4GB storage
Presentation Notes:
Challenges for the Smart Grid:
- Managing the Demand
- Managing the Delivery
- Managing the Power System as an Asset
Standards for Smart Grid technology are evolving. Security is an important consideration, as well as economics.
The present device situation is:
- There are 100s of devices and vendors
- The devices are fixed function (not flexible)
- There are many protocols and bus types
- The data visualization tools are poor
The desirable situation is:
- Distributed Intelligence
- Able to handle multiple communication protocols
- Architecture is able to handle the need for future improvements
- High level of security
Steve presented a National Instruments design, CompactRIO, which used field programmable gate array technology (FPGA) to enable the user to reconfigure I/O, a choice of I/O modules (there are about 100 available,) and a real time processor. The NI Labview software can be used to run the system.
An application example of use of the CompactRIO by a power company was presented. The objectives were:
- Faster fault identification
- Automatic fault isolation
- Real-time grid health monitoring
Presentation PDF: 2012-delaware-ieee-national_instruments-distributed_intelligence_and_smartgrid-mcalonan_final
