Greentech Lead America: SUBNET Solutions, a solutions
provider, has donated software and engineering time to help build the EnerNex
Smart Grid Labs (SGL).
SUBNET Solutions said the facility was developed to give
vendors, utilities and regulatory personnel a place to evaluate smart grid
services for communications, security, standards compliance and implementation
assistance.
The lab was opened on February 29, 2012, in Knoxville,
Tennessee.
SUBNET was selected to supply 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.
Travis Jaffray, technical product manager with SUBNET,
worked with EnerNex to help integrate a number of SUBNET smart grid
technologies at the lab.
EnerNex Smart Grid Labs is using 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 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,”
Jaffray said.
The lab’s substation architecture was 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 SUBNET Unified Grid Intelligence Architecture enables
utilities to configure substations in significantly less time than traditional
RTU or other tiered communication processor based architectures.
This architecture enables the consolidation of different
device configurations per substation into one consolidated device
configuration. SUBNET’s configuration capabilities enable configuration
automation that leverages the utilities engineering design standards and
configuration processes.