Poste Intelligent - the Next Generation Smart Substation for the French Power Grid

Abstract

The paper describes a smart substation project launched two years ago, as part of the French government's plan “investments for the future”. This project is named “Poste Intelligent” within RTE (Smart Substation, in English), and aims to test in real conditions the latest technological developments for both primary and secondary equipment using the second edition of the IEC 61850 standard and new information and communication technologies in a fully interoperable solution. For the first time in France, the substation is designed like an autonomous entity, with adaptive solutions using horizontal inter-substation communications, in addition to the traditional hierarchical concept of “substation to SCADA”. To manage complexity, a strong and well-designed automation system gives better and faster answers, and the automation system is based on a distributed design. Two demonstrators were selected in the principal French area in terms of penetration of wind energy with more than 600 MW installed power on the distribution system in a rural area that creates reversed energy flow from LV to EHV through the local HV system. For the primary equipment, RTE implements optical CTs and low power VTs with a smaller footprint, and uses native fully digital breakers, disconnectors and power transformers. For secondary equipment, RTE implement its first process bus based on a full optical network including more than 20 breakers and at two voltage levels (220 and 90kV). At the same time, various new sensors installed on both primary and secondary equipment feed a full monitoring solution. A new HMI gives enhanced situational awareness for automatic real time optimization of the load capacities. The smart substation concept also addresses in the process bus and the station bus other needs such as meteorology, access control, video infrared, virtual fence, monitoring sensors, water and electricity supply, thus creating a global native IEC 61850 solution. The design of the smart substation system has a brand new approach to redundancy and reliability for overall optimisation and standardisation. In particular, the protection plans that were dependent on the voltage level are converging toward a single solution. Poste Intelligent is a utility's way of embracing the best digital substation technologies from a reputed vendor, tailored in a practical way to meet its needs.