Implementation of Smarter, Safer, Reliable and Flexible Digital Substation 220/66 kV Sevaliya – A Pathway Through Engineering Excellence and Innovative Concepts

Substation technology has evolved from wired to optical technology with the help of key enabler standard, IEC 61850. In recent years’ IEC 618509-2 LE (process bus) based digital substation technology has also evolved from concept to reality and from digital bay pilots to fully digital substations. Each time there are challenges and learnings while implementing the technology. Building all together leading the technology towards incremental level of standardization and maturation.

GETCO a state transmission utility of Gujarat, has already adopted substation automation at station level (IEC 61850 8-1) since 2008. 75 Nos of such substations are already commissioned. In fact, all new substations are with this technology. Also, GETCO has implemented pilot projects on process bus (IEC 61850 9-2LE) based digital bay with different configuration and modalities to leverage adoption of the process bus technology. Based on continuous learnings and experiences of digitalization implementations, process bus based full digital substation 220/66kV Sevaliya having total 20 bays (220kV – 7 Nos and 66kV – 13 Nos) with transfer bus is also planned.

In a process, lot of challenges were faced at various phases of project life cycle right from initial phase for deriving requirements, engineering phase to testing & commissioning phase. All the challenges were address with bottom-up multi-domain engineering approach and deriving executable outcomes from each respective domain and harmonizing them for collective outputs to finalize features and functionalities. During the process, some unique and innovative features are also derived. These features have helped to enhance the reliability and flexibility and elevate prevailing practices to higher levee benchmark.

To ensure full proof testing and commissioning of all the features and functionalities a comprehensive FAT-SAT procedures are also derived covering right from basic functional tests to detailed performance and behaviour tests of all critical aspects. This has helped to establish the pathway for seamless configuration, testing & commissioning and FAT was completed within seven working days (record time) with desired performance.

The multi-domain engineering and configuration efforts supported with some innovative advanced feature has helped to design a state of the art highly intelligent Digital substation SAS revealing higher reliability and flexibility. Paper tries to cover practical implementation experience of GETCO for deploying full digital substation with extensive utilization of latest standards and features.