Greentech Lead America: SUBNET Solutions, a software
solutions provider for electrical utilities, has provided software and
engineering time to help build the EnerNex Smart Grid Labs (SGL).
The facility is aimed to give vendors, utilities and regulatory
personnel a place to evaluate smart grid services for communications, security,
standards compliance and implementation assistance.
SUBNET has supplied an integration platform for the
substation and distribution devices at SGL to demonstrate multi-vendor
interoperability. SUBNET’s vendor agnostic solutions enable EnerNex to
demonstrate advancements in unifying smart grid substation device access and
security.
SUBNET said that EnerNex Smart Grid Labs has deployed
SUBNET’s PowerSYSTEM Center with My Passwords and My IEDs to provide complete
and secure IED access control, password management, as well as My Faults for
event file collection.
SUBNET’s SubSTATION Server is also being used as a secure
data gateway and for protocol conversion, while SubSTATION Explorer is found in
the testing facility’s system as an HMI for visualization.
“One reason SUBNET was included in the project was
we provide specifically multi-vendor solutions. The smart grid lab includes
devices from multiple vendors such as Arbiter System, Bitronics, eMS, GE
Digital Energy, Hindle Power, SEL, RugggedCom, Sisco and TE Connectivity all of
which are accessible with SUBNET’s vendor agnostic software solutions,”
Travis Jaffray, technical product manager, SUBNET.
The lab’s substation architecture is deployed using the
SUBNET unified grid intelligence architecture, which SUBNET designed in order
to eliminate the expense and inefficiencies of legacy tiered substation
architectures.
The system includes redundancy, creating a more reliable
substation that is affordable and vastly improves the maintainability of the
overall solution.
Moreover, the SUBNET Unified Grid Intelligence
Architecture enables utilities to reduce time to configure substations. This
architecture enables the consolidation of numerous different legacy device
configurations per substation into one consolidated device configuration.
Also, SUBNET’s advanced configuration capabilities enable
configuration automation that leverages the utilities engineering design
standards and configuration processes that vastly simplifies and accelerates
system configuration.