TVA embarked on this IEC 61850 program to dramatically reduce the cost of building, refurbishing, operating and maintaining transmission substations. At the same time, the project hoped to advance protection, control, monitoring and automation capabilities within it's transmission system. To date, the Bradley 500kV Substation includes 34 Intelligent Electronic Devices from five manufacturers, selectively connected to redundant fiber optic networks as supplied by RuggedCom. Present project scope includes SCADA support, four distribution protection schemes, CB condition monitoring, transformer monitoring and a publish/subscribe server for multiple department access to data and functionality.

A demonstration of the TVA-Bradley project was given at the 2006 IEEE T&D conference in
May of 2006. This interoperability demonstration illustrated how different IED manufacturers, connected over the RuggedCom Ethernet network infrastructure, can communicate with each other in a simple, coordinated, and seamless manner. The IEC 61850 communications standard provides the means to integrate communications, information, and applications into
a coherent, flexible, and very powerful framework for substation automation.

The selection of RuggedCom as the sole provider for the Ethernet network equipment solidifies RuggedCom’s leadership role in IEC 61850 substation communications. RuggedCom has the largest installed base of IEC 61850 implementations worldwide.

To learn more about the TVA-Bradley IEC 61850 Substation project click here
The following diagram is a simplified IEC 61850 network architecture example.
To learn more about IEC 61850 and RuggedCom click here