Background
Growing urbanization rising energy demand and increasing costs have further motivated the power sector to utilize their electrical system capabilities more efficiently and smartly – toward smart substation transformation. The three main challenges of grid modernization are climate change driving extreme weather events impacting electrical grid changes, increased risk of cyberattacks on grid infrastructure, and high penetration of renewable energy sources which increases power flow complexities.
The Virtual Protection Relay (VPR) concept is an essential building block for grid modernization, offering a solution for protecting complex power distribution substations. Through an architecture where software-defined and virtualization platforms come together to deploy critical circuit protection functions, simplify life cycle management to increase performance, and reduce CAPEX and maintenance costs; to deliver reliable, resilient electricity supply for the future.
Requirements
A VPR solution can reduce the physical size and complexity of a substation infrastructure, reducing CAPEX costs, in addition to increasing flexibility of deploying protection functions and automation algorithms for strengthening performance and reducing maintenance costs. The VPR solution builds upon the IEC 61850 standard and key requirements include:
- Industrial-grade IEC Certification – The network appliance needs to be IEC 61850-3 and IEEE 1613 compliant to withstand harsh critical infrastructure environments and is specially designed for power substations.
- High-Availability – A reliable power supply is essential and a redundant power path ensures continuous operations and uptime for an extended period.
- Scalable – Rich I/O functions, scalability, and expansion features are needed for better performance even as demands increase, including swappable drive bays, PCIe slots for time sync cards, or industrial-grade NICs.
- Multi-layer Hardware Security – Onboard TPM for secure crypto-processing and tamper resistance at the hardware level.
Solutions
Minimization of hardware can lead to more efficient and effective management and maintenance, in addition to ease of replacement and upgrades. Hardware and software development continue to provide new opportunities to leverage Virtual Protective Relaying.
As a 3U rackmount industrial edge consolidation server, LEC-3340 is designed to implement modern IT structures and benefit from virtualization to reduce hardware costs and increase availability and security. With its scalable memory, LEC-3340 can run several virtual machines while assigning each of them the resources of a standalone system for virtualization and cybersecurity.
Powered by Intel® Xeon® E3-1505L V6 or Core™ i5-7442EQ (formerly Kaby Lake-H) processor to offer outstanding performance, LEC-3340 also supports rich I/O functions, including 4x PCIe slots, 4x RJ-45 GbE LAN ports, 5x USB 3.0 ports, 2x 2.5” swappable drive bays, DP/DVI display port, and 2x isolated COM ports, to consolidate multiple workloads for various protocols connecting substations. For the industrial environment, LEC-3340 is compliant with IEC 61850-3 and IEEE 1613 standards and supports -40~70°C wide operating temperatures.
Lanner’s Industrial Grade PCIe Expansion Network Interface Card LEK-IS401 / LEK-IG401 comprises 4-port GbE RJ45 / 4x GbE SFP ports and is driven by the powerful Intel i210IS/IT Ethernet controller. This industrial-grade expansion card supports wide operating temperatures of -40 to 70ºC for demanding rugged environments.