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Tech Tour: Georgia Tech's Demonstration of Centralized Substation Protection and Control $
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Developed by the Georgia Tech Research Corporation alongside Southern Company and EPRI, this $2.6 million ARPA-E project represents the definitive blueprint for the next generation of grid security. Instead of relying on complex, settings-based protection schemes, this initiative introduces a centralized and autonomous protection system using setting-less relays which make coordination of relay settings obsolete for the modern substation.
Tour attendees will step inside the facility to experience:
- The Command Center: Witness the vulnerability of protection and control of legacy grid infrastructure and explore the causes of relay mis-operations especially for IBR dominated power systems; quantify the decreased reliability of the modern power system.
- The Digital Shield: Explore how digitization of the grid leads naturally to centralized protection and control, monitoring the health of an entire substation in real time with minimal delays, and providing operator with critical details of the operation of the system at frequencies that are not possible with legacy systems.
- The Self-Healing Lab: Watch the system instantly detect hidden failures and malicious cyberattacks, by leveraging data redundancy; detection is followed by identification of the root cause and self-healing and maintain power normal operation of the system.
- The Clean Energy Horizon: Discover how this level of structural resilience paves the way for onboarding massive amounts of wind and solar power and the subsequent benefits, including drastic reduction in carbon emissions.
By transitioning into a fully digitalized grid protection and control, this project offers an intelligent, self-monitored and self-defending system immune to the effects of IBR dominated power systems of reduced fault currents, reduced inertia and new faster dynamics; it offers utility leaders a firsthand look at the future of operational resilience. Attendees can come away from it with a tangible roadmap to transition their legacy substations into automated, self-defending assets built for the IBR dominated power system.