Standards & Protocols Support Capabilities and Services

Information exchange is a vital component in the efficient operation, profitability, and growth of a restructuring electric utility industry. Commercial and regulatory needs today mandate a variety of advanced utility functions, including:

• Real-time calculation/optimization of total and available transmission and generation
• Contingency assessment and response using live data to feed wide-area protection and islanding algorithms
• Asset and workforce management with constantly updated databases
• Spot market/power exchange energy pricing and delivery
• Demand response, energy efficiency, and customer management through real-time pricing, advanced metering, and distributed generation
• Outage management, auto-restoration and distribution network optimization based on up-to-the-minute data from customer premises

Integrated information systems and telecommunications networks capable of supporting these functions, as well as future capabilities, are critical in the changing utility environment.

Key to facilitating this exchange is adherence to industry standards and specifications and utilization of established protocols in the design, implementation, and operation of electric power and communication systems. For a utility to deploy and maintain an open and interoperable communications and control environment, standards must shape the architecture and accepted practices of the entire enterprise, especially when it comes time to integrate different systems, vendors, and technologies.

The movement away from traditional vertically integrated utilities has made it more imperative that industry standards and protocols be utilized. This has been underscored by such events as the August 2003 North American blackout and power system disruptions in Europe, and other locations.

EnerNex^® Corporation provides recognized expertise in industry standards and communication protocols. We have worked with numerous utilities, research organizations, and government agencies in the development, implementation, integration, and verification of communication standards and protocols.

Key to this is our involvement in standards making organizations and other bodies such as the IEEE, IEC, ANSI, and Cigré. Our personnel have been key to the development of such standards and protocols as IEC 61850, IEC 60870-5, and DNP3. Our staff played a key role in the EPRI Utility Communication Architecture (UCA^®) project as well as the EPRI IntelliGrid Architecture, a pivotal effort to establish a roadmap and process for integrating utility power systems and communications networks. In addition, several of our staff members hold key positions with the UCA International Users Group, DNP3 Technical Committee, and IEC Technical Committee 57. This activity helps us and our clients keep tabs on what is going on within the industry.

Our staff has extensive utility communications applications experience including:

• Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)
• Energy Management Systems (EMS)
• Distribution Management Systems (DMS)
• Power system equipment and power quality monitoring
• Advanced metering infrastructure
• Demand response infrastructure
• Substation automation and control
• Data acquisition from generation assets

This expertise, coupled with involvement in standards-setting support and tracking, positions us to help you with the implementation, integration, and deployment of communications standards and protocols.

Our service offerings include:

• Training your personnel in communications protocols and technologies
• Assessing and making recommendations for your communications network
• Supervising or coordinating your communications project
• Facilitating information exchange with standards and regulatory organizations
• Researching the usefulness of new communications technologies to your business
• Helping to define requirements for your new utility communications products
• Designing hardware and software systems to fit your communications needs
• Testing equipment against industry communications standards
• Notifying you of opportunities for interoperability demonstrations and partnerships

We have detailed knowledge in a variety of specific communications technologies, including:

• IEC 61850 Substation Automation suite
• IntelliGrid communications architecture
• Distributed Network Protocol (DNP3)
• IEC 60870-5 Telecontrol suite
• Modbus
• IEC 61968/61970 Common Information Model/Generic Interface Definitions

• IEC Technical Committee 57 Working Groups
• TC 88 IEC 61400 Part 25 Working Group on Wind Power Plant Communications
• IEEE Power Engineering, Computer, Instrumentation and Measurement Societies and Standards Association
• OpenAMI
• UtilityAMI
• UCA International Users Group
• The DNP User’s Group
• The DNP Technical Committee
• Cigre` working groups

We also have staff members involved with industry initiatives such as the GridWise Architecture Council and participating in the work of organizations such as the North American Electric Reliability Council.

We can provide support with many communications-related techniques and methodologies:

• Requirements and use case development
• Object-oriented design
• Real-time embedded software development
• Protocol design and interoperability
• Quality assurance and testing
• Security assessment and management
• NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) compliance

To learn more, click here to download an Adobe Acrobat brochure describing our capabilities in this area.

Utility Communications

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