Dispowergen

Since 1993, the market for new turbines to generate clean power from wind has grown at over 40 % per year. Already over 20,000 turbines are producing electricity world-wide.

It is not sufficient to develop a distributed generation system that only produces electric power. A fully automated - remotely supervised - system that requires little or no human intervention seems to be ideal. Technologies bundled into the distributed generation system, therefore, has to include interfaces to supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) of control centres. Additional applications that are necessary for a complete system may include: metering, protection and control, remote monitoring and fault diagnosis, automated dispatch and control, data retrieval, site optimisation of electrical / thermal outputs, asset management, as well as condition monitoring and diagnosis.

In most utility applications, wind power plants are usually modelled simply as an isolated generation resource. However, an interconnected electricity system is greater than merely the sum of its power generators! Interconnection means: connecting the generator to the electric grid and connecting the power plant's information system to control centres. While the first connection is compatible with the regional grid, the second connection is usually proprietary.

Utilities spend an ever-increasing amount for real-time information exchange; costs for data integration and maintenance are exploding. In response to this need, IEEE has published a suite of international standards in the "Utility Communications Architecture (UCA (tm))" - IEEE Technical Report 1550 (1999). UCA provides standards to improve device data integration into the information and automation technology, reducing engineering, commissioning, operation, monitoring, diagnostics, and maintenance costs. UCA has been incorporated into the draft standard series IEC 61850 (Communication networks and systems in substations) published by IEC TC 57 in March 2001. The standard information models of real-world devices (e.g. switches, disconnectors, transformer, measurement unit, ...) can be (re-)used by applications for self-description and on-line verification.

Karlheinz Schwarz (SCC, April 2001)