User Spotlight Series 2.0 - Hybrid testing of power system protection communication over wireless 5G

Description

In the transition towards carbon-neutral smart grids, the role of ICT infrastructure is crucial, and exploiting wireless 5G may bring flexibility and significant cost savings in both installation and maintenance. Furthermore, power systems would gain access to 5G services including network slicing, massive IoT, and edge computing.

Testing of wireless communication for power systems applications demands a realistic hybrid pilot environment. In this presentation, we discuss how we upscaled our previous protection communication test setup to provide a novel pilot environment for testing wireless 5G technology on protection communication. Protection was chosen due to its most rigorous QoS requirements compared to other power system applications.

The pilot environment consisted of a closed-loop CHIL simulation on RTDS enhanced with access to a 5G test network and commercial networks. The devices under test were relays and merging units. The switches formed a natural coupling point, through which the data traffic was routed to the desired wireless network. Supplementary video and sensor data traffic were generated to load the connection and to test how different traffic profiles affect the critical communication.
Three diverse and latency-critical protection applications were tested in the pilot environment: virtual fault passage indicator, line differential, and intertrip protection.

Period	24 Nov 2021
Event title	User Spotlight Series 2.0
Event type	Webinar
Degree of Recognition	International