Dr. Bogdan Kasztenny, IEEE Fellow
Protection and System Engineering Manager
General Electric

Marriott Bloor & Yorkville Hotel
High Park Room
90 Bloor Street East, Toronto, Ontario map

TTC accessible (Yonge and Bloor subway station)
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Today’s electric utilities face several challenges in the area of Protection and Control (P&C).

First, a considerable percentage of P&C equipment has reached its end-of-life, calling for accelerated retrofit schedules.

Second, a considerable percentage of the experienced engineering and field workforce is scheduled to retire in the next few years.

Third, the fully loaded power system does not allow for the flexible work practices of the past. Work needs to be done quickly with no service disruptions and minimum outage duration.

Fourth, utilities operate in a new deregulated environment with increasing cost pressures while integrating more generation and load.

Each of these four issues taken separately is manageable. When combined, they create a significant challenge for utilities in the next 5-15 years. A big part of the problem is the way P&C systems are being engineered and deployed.

Copper wiring is installed in a substation to integrate the P&C devices by providing a set of signal paths to move raw information, in the form of currents and voltages, representing the status of and controlling the operation of the primary power system. These copper wires have an extremely low signal density, and the installation details are highly dependent on each specific application.

The process of designing, installing and testing all of the tens or hundreds of thousands of copper connections in a typical high-voltage substation is exceedingly labour intensive, with most of the labour requirements being the on-site labour. This labour is almost exclusively manual, with very little opportunity of automation or optimization. The end result is a very labour-intensive and error-susceptible process that adds significant time and cost to each and every project and makes long-term maintenance and changes difficult to implement.

The industry recognizes a need for change in the way the P&C equipment is engineered and installed – much in the same way the modern assembly line changed the face of the manufacturing sector. The advent of the modern assembly line at the beginning of the 21st century was driven by three basic principles:

1. Moving product from one workstation to another until completed.
2. Individual workstations are optimized using fixed automation, special purpose tooling and personnel skilled at that specific task.
3. Product is built from standardized interchangeable parts, reducing variability in parts consumed and increasing quality consistency in product produced.

The above model, before it could be applied to the task of installing P&C equipment, required an underlying technical solution created specifically for the P&C domain.

The solution is “process bus”.

Process bus involves the use of high-speed digital communications to carry ac waveforms and contact I/O states between the power equipment in the switchyard and the relays etc. in the control house. Process bus technology allows for much of the work related to the design and construction of custom copper connections from bulk materials to be replaced by the simple placing and plugging together standard interchangeable parts per basic principle 3 above, said parts being factory manufactured off site per basic principles 1 and 2.

This presentation addresses possible process bus architecture for an optical fibre-based P&C system that fits the purpose of facilitating an industrial revolution in the field of P&C system engineering and deployment.

The term “architecture” refers to the definition and structure of the interface points in a switchyard, partitioning and allocation of P&C functions to the devices, the underlying structure of time synchronization, settings and firmware management, failure-tolerant communication framework, required data throughputs and latency considerations, data traffic patterns, commissioning and routine maintenance, and other related aspects.

Bogdan Kasztenny holds the position of Protection and System Engineering Manager for the Digital Energy business of General Electric. Prior to joining GE in 1999, Dr. Kasztenny worked as an Assistant Professor conducting research and teaching power system courses at the Wroclaw University of Technology, Texas A&M University, and Southern Illinois University. His full time academic career culminated with a prestigious Senior Fulbright Fellowship in 1997. Between 2000 and 2004 Bogdan was heavily involved in the development of the globally recognized Universal RelayTM product line, for which in 2004 he received GE’s Thomas Edison Award for innovation. Bogdan remains hands on and instrumental in new product development at General Electric. He acts as an R&D liaison with several universities and Corporate Research. Bogdan authored more than 160 papers, conceived numerous protection and control products, is an inventor of several patents, IEEE Fellow, and a member of the Main Committee of the IEEE PES Power System Relaying Committee, where he chairs or co-chairs several working groups. Dr. Kasztenny is a registered Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Ontario, and a Member of the Canadian National Committee of CIGRE, Study Committee B5 Protection and Automation.