Power Engineers Have Developed an Emergency Algorithm for Substations

13:52, June 15, 2021

It will help cut off electricity to consumers in case of emergencies less often

Employees of the Smart Grid Smart Power Systems Development Laboratory of UrFU developed an algorithm for control at a digital substation. The algorithm helps emergency automatics act faster and more accurately when a failure occurs in the power system. Thus it is possible to localize the problem, prevent its spreading to other facilities and minimize disconnection of power consumers and financial losses. The project "Improvement of Approaches to Digital Control of Electric Power Facilities" received funding from the Sverdlovsk regional government in May as part of the Ural Research and Education Center.

"When an accident occurs, it turns out that point "A" has excess power, and point "B" has a deficit. And the emergency control system balances the situation. The main issue is to calculate the option to solve the problem quickly. If automation is implemented, then the accident will not develop, a large number of consumers will not have to be disconnected, or it will be possible not to disconnect anyone at all, and the damage to the power grid companies and consumers will be minimal. Thus, the algorithm implements flexible emergency control and prevents us from approaching the dangerous line, after which serious problems for the power system start to occur,” explains Andrey Pazderin, head of the Department of Automated Electric Systems at UrFU.

The algorithm was tested in a laboratory with supercomputers at UrFU. The equipment there allows us to test devices that stand at enterprises. For example, to build a digital substation complex, the real data from the Kalininskaya power substation was used. Another significant result of the laboratory's work is the construction and development of digital substation technologies.

"For the example of the Kalininskaya substation, we created a software and hardware complex for the digital substation as part of a federal target program project. In practice, its application means reliable flexible control and better protection of the energy facility. The result is fewer emergency events, higher reliability and quality of power supply. For Russia, this is a unique functioning architecture of a digital substation. But the peculiarity of our development is that our software and hardware complex is scalable. This means that the package solution can be used with minimal changes at any substation - in the Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, or Kurgan regions, or even in Kenya," says Andrey Pazderin.

Potential buyers are all electric grid companies. Commercialization of the project results has already begun. The industrial partner of the research is the engineering company Prosoft-Systems. The concept development, creation of science-intensive algorithms and the testing part of the work was carried out by Ural Federal University employees. Prosoft-Systems created the equipment and industrial algorithms.