Design and application of power quality monitoring system for the smart substation based on IEC 61850

Along with enhancement of electrical techniques, power quality has become an important issue for both power utilities and users, leading to growing popularity of power quality monitoring systems. Previously, these systems are implemented in the traditional substations. As the smart substation based on IEC 61850 gradually becomes the major technical choice recently, the combination between smart substation and power quality is focused on by the industry. However, there is no smart substation successfully implemented with a high-resolution power quality monitoring system at present, caused by the low sampling rate designed for protection and control components. This study proposes a design for both power quality monitoring devices and systems for smart substation technique with high sampling rate of 12.8 kHz. Fully satisfying the power quality monitoring requirement, the system provides a robust and reliable approach to communicate with the process-level network in the substation without generating the possible data congestion. The proposed method is applied in the first new generation of smart substation in Shanghai, which is proved to operate well. Furthermore, this system is connected to Chinese largest urban power quality monitoring system by transmitting both power quality data and substation operation data for enhanced analysis.