Marzio Pozzuoli, President and CEO of RuggedCom, and Roger Moore, VP of Engineering at RuggedCom,
presented “Ethernet in the Substation” at the 2006 IEEE Power Engineering Society General Meeting in Montreal,
Canada, in June 2006.

Abstract

Trends in electric utility automation, specifically substation automation, have converged upon a common communications architecture with the goal of having interoperability between a variety of Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) found in the substation. This initiative was begun back in the late 1980s driven by the major North American utilities under the technical auspices of EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute). The resulting standard that emerged is known as the Utility Communications Architecture 2.0 (UCA2.0) and is now becoming an international standard as IEC61850. This architecture, which is now being adopted worldwide by utilities and IED vendors alike, has as its underlying network technology - Ethernet.

This paper looks at the key issues and requirements for Ethernet in the substation environment and for substation automation applications requiring real-time performance. Specific topics addressed are: EMI phenomena and atmospheric conditions in substations which can affect network performance, new standards introduced by the IEC and IEEE that establish new EMI and environmental requirements specifically for communications networks (i.e. Ethernet) in substations, critical Layer-2 features of modern Ethernet switching hubs (i.e. switches) which enhance realtime deterministic
performance as well as fault tolerant loop architectures and network redundancy.