Red Eléctrica de España Case Study

Objective

Provide a Highly Reliable Remote Access to Transmission Substations and Enable Seamless Integration of Legacy Serial Devices to Ethernet Network.

Solution

RuggedMC™ RMC30 2-port Serial to Ethernet converter, Connecting Legacy Devices at Each Substation to Ethernet Network and Providing Reliable Communications to Remote Maintenance Center.

Company Overview

REE (Red Eléctrica de España) is the company that became the world’s first TSO (Transmission System Operator) dedicated exclusively to the operation of power transmission systems. A pioneer in its field, REE occupies a position of leadership today in these activities.

When REE was created in 1985, it took over the transmission grid and the operation of the Spanish power system, well before the recent world-wide trend towards the segregation of these activities, establishing electricity transmission as a separate activity from electricity generation and distribution.

Red Eléctrica’s peninsular transmission grid is composed of more than 34,300 kilometers of high voltage electrical lines and more than 3,100 substations positions, and has more than 62,000 MVA of transformation capacity. Red Eléctrica runs the power system, both on the Spanish mainland, as well as on the insular and extrapeninsular systems. In doing so, it ensures a safe, continuous power flow from the power generators to the centers of consumption.

REE is recognized world-wide as an efficient company that renders its services to the power sector and to society in a safe and reliable manner.

Customer Requirements

REE is the owner of more than 3000 transmission substations each of these having several dozens of IEDs.
The migration to Ethernet capable IEDs is a slow process and thus the customer has to manage a large installed base of serial legacy devices. For the purpose of centralized and automated control, REE requires a means to have remote access to all legacy devices like RTUs, Protection Relays and Control IEDs in order to connect them into the SCADA and to the network in the remote maintenance center.

REE needed a solution for integration of a large number of legacy IEDs into their remote maintenance system, a platform that allows REE remote network connections with all the protection and control devices located in transmission substations. REE’s remote maintenance platform helps to extract the configuration files, fault records and event logs from the IEDs of any vendor in a seamless way. Reliable remote access to all intelligent electronic devices at the substation is of vital importance for the transmission utility to ensure fast service restoration from fault conditions.

Implementation and integration of legacy equipment into a common network

Red Electrica has chosen RuggedCom RMC30 Serial to Ethernet converter to interface with the legacy serial devices that are located in the remote substations. The RMC30 takes the serial data from the legacy devices and encapsulates it in Ethernet packets for transport over the WAN network to
the Remote Maintenance Center. One or two serial IEDs are connected to an RMC30 at each of REE’s remote substations. The RMC30 is then connected via Ethernet link to a RuggedCom RSG2300 substation LAN Ethernet Switch. RSG2300 devices are industrially hardened Ethernet switches that form the substation communication backbone, connecting all RMC30s as well as modern P&C devices with native Ethernet interface and provide the link to REE’s corporate WAN. The corporate WAN Ethernet Network at REE interconnects all substations to the remote maintenance center and is implemented over REE’s own private SDH backbone.

The RuggedCom RMC30, thanks to its serial server functionality, is ideally suited to provide Ethernet connectivity to legacy serial devices that is required to access the critical files stored in the IEDs such as fault records and sequence of events that are used during post fault analysis at the utility remote maintenance system. The high voltage transmission substations are subject to harsh environmental conditions including extreme ranges in temperature, humidity and exposure to high levels of EMI, therefore it is a requirement to implement a device such as the RMC30 which is compliant to IEC 61850-3. This standard is a requirement for electric power substations and has been used to give REE the confidence that their communications network will operate reliability.

 

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