Integrating IEC 61850 at TVA substations for protection, SCADA, and enterprise applications

TVA has begun planning and executing an effort to dramatically cut the cost of building, refurbishing, operating, and maintaining transmission substations, while profoundly advancing protection, control, monitoring, and automation capabilities. The 500kV/161kV Bradley Substation has been chosen for this initiative and initially involves integration of 34 IEDs from five manufacturers, selectively connected to redundant fiber communication networks within the substation. These will support SCADA, four or more distributed protection applications, condition monitoring for circuit breakers, transformer monitoring, and a publish/subscribe server that will make substation data and functionality available to multiple departments across the TVA enterprise. More IEDs are scheduled to follow in support of wide-area protection schemes. The paper highlights the objectives, plans, and implementation accomplished. Particular attention will be given to resolved and unresolved problem areas, so that the industry can benefit from their exposure and discussion of proposed remedies.