CSEE Journal of
Power & Energy Systems

Foreword for the Special Section on Power Substation Protection

2017-10-12

Three stages of substation intellectualization have been undergone in China with more than 10 years’ development. Based on the valued lessons and experience in the 1st stage- digital substation, 47 pilot projects of smart substation have been put into operation in stage two by the end of 2012. And then China entered the new stage of overall construction of smart substation. There were 843 smart substations operating in China by the end of 2013, and now the total number of operating smart substations is more than 2000. The IEC61850 technology based substation automation technology has also been fast developed all over the world. Much experience of constructing and operating projects has been obtained. The ongoing or future developing directions of the smart substation has also been discussed or researched in both academic institutes and industries in recent years, while the hierarchical protection and control system has been proposed and adopted. In response to this, this special issue focuses on the latest development and research in smart power substation protection & control.

Eight papers were collected in this special issue. There are three papers focusing on the new development and applications of IEC61850 in substations. The first one in this special issue is co-authored by Prof. Xinzhou Dong from Tsinghua University, Mr. Delin Wang, Chief Manager on protection in the national electric power dispatch and control center in State Grid of China Co., and Mrs. Manyong Zhao, Chief engineer from dispatcher centre, China Southern Power Grid Co. The smart power substation development in China was introduced in detail. Another one is from IEEE Fellow Dr. K. P. Brand with ABB Switzerland. He is also chair of the Swiss chapter of IEEE PES. A definition of smartness in protection, automation and control systems in substation was discussed in this paper. The last paper comes from Prof. Jinghan He’ group in Beijing Jiaotong University. A distributed protection method was proposed in this paper based on multi-units overlapping in smart substation.

Two papers are focusing on protection technology in AC transmission line. The research group headed by IEEE Fellow, Prof. A. P. Sakis Meliopoulos from George Tech US, introduced the dynamic state estimation based protection of mutually coupled transmission lines. Another paper comes from the group headed by Prof. Xianggen Yin from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China. The Jiles-Atherton model parameters of CT were identified using a hybrid genetic/simulated annealing algorithm in this paper.

One paper introduced the new development of protection in HVDC direction. The authors come from the group in Xi’an Jiaotong Unviersity, headed by Prof. Guobing Song. An analytical method of fault characteristics of boundary elements was presented in this paper.

The last two papers in this special session came from Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and CEPRI China, which were all focusing on the distribution network. An intelligent coordinated protection and control strategy for distribution network with wind farm connection was proposed by Dr. Zhou Liu form Norway. And Smart distribution substation integration technology was discussed by Mr. Qipeng Song.

I would like to thank all authors for their excellent contributions, and all reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Finally, the publication of this special issue gets strong support from Mrs. Haofang Liu and her colleagues. Thanks for all friends in CSEE JPES editorial staff.