Q&A with Hitachi Energy’s VP & GM for Substation Automation
Thanks to the rapid pace of the energy transition and subsequent grid modernisation, digital substations — modern electrical substations that use digital technology to monitor, control and manage electrical assets — are emerging as a crucial technology for utilities to manage increasing complexity and enhance sustainability.
Steven Kunsman, an energy veteran with a career at Hitachi Energy and its predecessors spanning more than 40 years, shares his insights on the evolution and impact of digital substations in the power industry.
As the leader of the pre-sales team for North America at Hitachi Energy, Steven brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. His Hitachi Energy tenure — as well as his involvement in developing the IEC 61850 standard, which underpins modern digital substation technology — gives him a unique perspective on the industry’s transformation.
Here, Steven discusses how digital substations are revolutionising grid management, improving reliability and supporting the integration of renewable energy sources.
Q. Hi, Steven. Please introduce yourself and what you do.
Sometimes, it feels like I do everything under the sun. I started out with the Brown Boveri Corporation — the BB in ABB — before Hitachi Energy bought the power grids division out. In my 40 years I’ve been through it all, I’ve done it all.
We’re trying to promote the values in our new portfolio and solutions to help customers manage through this digital journey, especially around protection, control, automation and the digital substation as a core. The underlying technology is based on an open communication standard, IEC 68150. I was one of the original working group members in 1998 that developed the standard, which was introduced in 2004.
Twenty years later, we’re seeing the benefits across the world of this open base standard that has allowed customers and utilities to integrate multiple manufacturers based on the same technology.
Q. How does Hitachi Energy positively contribute to sustainability, especially when it comes to the integration of grids?
When it comes to sustainability, we hit multiple aspects of that. My focus right now is North America, but across the US, there’s a huge push for green energy.
We have some really large wind projects, massive utility-scale offshore wind, and we’re in the midst of deploying some of those and supporting initiatives.
Any type of renewable integration — whether it's a PV facility or a wind facility — is going to have an impact on the traditional grid. On top of that, we now have all electrification of EV infrastructure. The grid is transforming. What was traditional 20 years ago has been turned upside down because of the connections of renewables into the distribution grid.
When looking at conventional substations implemented in the past 20 years, there’s no way that the conventional can keep up to support DER and EV infrastructure deployments. That’s where digitialisation has an impact and supports the transformation of the utility space thanks to smaller footprint, fewer copper wires in these systems and ability to quickly deploy these types of systems into the utility substation.
When it comes to sustainability, there are all kinds of touchpoints. And with smaller and smaller footprints, you’ll have less truck rolls, less copper. The control house where these digital substations and the secondary protection and control systems are contained require up to half of the space requirements. That all adds up from a sustainability perspective.
But the big item is supporting the transformation of the grid today to integrate solar, wind and EV infrastructure.
Q. What are the key technological advancements that make digital substations a more sustainable and efficient option compared to traditional substations?
New technology has been introduced and Hitachi Energy has new products. The SAM 600, for example, is the process interface unit that provides a smaller footprint through functional consolidation. Consolidating more and more devices into fewer boxes goes a long way to support a significant footprint reduction.
From a grid automation perspective, software and analytics can start looking at the health of utility primary equipment. Transformers monitoring software for asset management can support predictive maintenance providing an indication that that transformer is starting to show some signs of deterioration or potential maintenance., It is very important understand the transformer’s health prior to failure. If it does fail, there could be a very, very long outage.
Q. How do digital substations help utilities manage the increasing complexity of modern network demands, particularly when it comes to the integration of renewable energy sources and the rise of distributed energy resources?
Whether it’s specifically a digital substation or even distribution automation system, the ability to have telemetry and have awareness in the grid is so important — whether it's a sensor that’s sitting at the PV facility to know whether or not the grid needs reactive power. DER control to these PV facilities are able interact with these inverter based resources to provide reactive power supporting grid stability.
If you look at DER interconnections, the traditional utility distribution substation’s transformer t was originally designed for power to flow in one way — now the utility substation can interconnect five PV facilities where the transformer now has power flowing back into the utility grid and monitoring the transformer for reverse power flow creating an overload condition. This is where distribution automation systems can be very important.
The system can monitor that transformer in the utility substation measuring the power flow from the reverse direction and determine whether the overload condition will result in transformer overheating or leading to a failure. The distribution automation system can initiate control schemes to disconnect the PV facilities allowing the transformer to return to a normal state.
These are the types of really interesting applications that can be deployed allowing utilities to protect their traditional assets in these changing conditions.
Q. Can you provide specific examples or case studies where investing in digital substations has significantly improved grid reliability and performance for utility companies?
One of the main values behind the digital substation is modern technology and advancements when it comes to protection and control systems. So for example, Hitachi Energy’s Relion 670 series has a lot of functional capability versus what was deployed 20 years ago. Moving to a more digital approach allows removal of up to 80% of the copper wires compared to a conventional system. From a reliability perspective, these systems having fewer components and significant reduction in copper wire will lead to fewer potential points of failure driving system availability up. The availability number for protection and control system should be 99.999%, which means that that system has been designed for a downtime of less than 10 minutes a year.
Again, the whole concept behind advanced solutions and digitalisation allows functional consolidation, fewer boxes and fewer points of failures. This allows increased data availability using modern communications and systems providing information to monitor assets and support grid modernization.
These substations are not designed as they were 20 years ago where they could sustain a 20% to 30% increase in load. The grids are almost to the point where they’re running on the edge and any type of disturbance in there has more wide impacts on the grid stability. Utilities are definitely pressured there from a reliability perspective to maintain power, and then the challenges with renewable integration come into play, creating other types of challenges to the utilities.
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