Virtualizing the Power Grid (ft. ABB, Tesco Automation & Salt River Project), InnoTalks EP26 (1/3)

Hello, and welcome to Advantech's latest InnoTalk. I'm Carolyn Swan, your host for today's session, where we'll discuss the critical role of substation virtualization in modernizing the grid. This technology not only enhances real time protection and control, but also significantly improves safety, security, and energy reliability, delivering better distribution with fewer outages. The increasing frequency of natural disasters, such as hurricane Helene and the California wildfires underscores the urgent need for resilient energy infrastructure. Reliable electricity delivery is more than a convenience. It's a necessity, and it all hinges on a robust and innovative grid system. I'm thrilled to announce today's esteemed panel, featuring founding members of the Virtual Protection Automation and Control Alliance, or VPAC. These experts are at the forefront of advancing grid modernization through virtualization. Please welcome Darren Duranda, principal protection engineer, Tesco Automation, Michael Carberry, principal engineer, Salt River Project, Vivek Singh, marketing and business development manager, ABB, and Ken Dennen, product manager for energy and utilities at Vantec. Together, we'll explore the challenges facing today's electric grid and its rapid evolution, share a collaborative vision for addressing these issues, and highlight the groundbreaking work of the VPAC alliance, including results of the early partnership, a virtual protection relay or VPR, a solution designed to meet the critical needs of utility companies at the substation, the edge of the grid. So with that said, let me start with you, Ken. Since we're in the world of rising energy demands with the call of sustainable development, what are the challenges facing grid operators today? Well, in addition to the unpredictable weather events and wildfires that you all already mentioned, the scalability of the grid, is being challenged, so we need to deliver more power. But we're also facing challenges with the evolution of the grid from a unidirectional flow to a more complex flow of power, between generation and consumers, as well as renewable energy resources, and, energy storage both within the grid and distributed outside the grid as well as, other distributed energy resources. As coupled with the scalability demands, that includes things like data centers increasing their power loads, largely driven by AI being introduced, and also the electrification of transportation, which includes electric vehicles and other modes of transportation. Can you help elaborate on what Advantech products can help grid operators? Yeah. So traditionally, substations use, proprietary appliances, purpose built hardware to automate their systems. These systems have been engineered for extreme reliability, but they, have become more complex to manage with these new energy flow patterns. And what we're trying to do is move towards a model where commercial off the shelf hardware that Advantech produces, can be used by a software defined infrastructure, to provide a much more agile, substation that can react to the demands and of on the new grid. Thanks, Ken. So including the hardware, it sounds like there's software defined solutions at play here. What are some of the other aspects to the VPAC and VPR solution? Sure. Advantech is, not only a member of the VPAC alliance helping specify this, but we also have solution partners, such as, VMware, who provides a, hypervisor solution for real time virtualization of operations in the substation, as well as application providers. Today, we have here ABD with us who's really leading, the charge here with their virtualized protection and control application, which Vivek will will speak to us about. This is really great, Ken. Thank you so much. It sounds like quite the transformation. Now let's take the next question to the marketing and business development leader in ABB's energy and utilities practice, Vivek. So, Vivek, why is substation virtualization important to ABB, and what steps have you taken to enable the market? Of course. Thank you very much for, for having me here. So I I wanna build upon what Ken just mentioned. Right? That the the the power grid that we have right now is way different than what we had before two thousands because of bidirectional flow, because of the energy demand changing, and where it's getting used. And EV has been a key player all throughout since many decades in protection and control. What we did is we we reached out why it's important for us. I'll answer that question first. Why it's important is because we reached out to the customers and we ask customer, what is important to you? And as Ken mentioned, what is important to them is having the ability and flexibility to choose off the shelf hardware and have a software defined solution which can then enable them to merge those things together. And you're really giving all the flexibility to customers to choose. And that's what prompted ABB to come up with this virtualized protection and control system, which we call SSC six hundred. This one system, for example, can do up to thirty circuit protections. Now if you have one supercomputer and you you you have thirty circuits, you can really download another version of SSC six hundred virtual centralized protection scheme on the same computer as long as you have the computing capacity. So you don't have to really expand the hardware as long as you have a good hardware. So really you're giving customers an option to utilize the higher computing power by getting the stuff off the shelf and merging that with a protection control provider like ABB and our solution. This is such a great example, Vivek. Thank you so much. So now that we have virtualized protection, what would be the next step? What would a utility do for the next step in the solution? Yeah. Absolutely. I'm glad you asked. So as you can imagine, I'm super excited. Being an engineer, I find these things super fascinating. And I think of it, centralized and virtualized protection as the step one. That's really the first step of doing protection and control in twenty first century. With this technology and with the amount of computing power and rapid increase in the computing power, it gives us really, enables us to install various predictive analytics softwares and AI tools to then come to know about how my overall substation is performing and how it's going to perform in future. In fact, ABB has launched AI fault predictive analysis software, which is, we which we have partnered with customers, and we found out that we can we we can detect ninety five percent of detectable falls two weeks in advance. And that's that's that's what we are looking forward to. With more software and more computing power, having this virtual solution really allows customer to go beyond than just simply having protection and control to more on asset management and predictive analysis. Wow. It's great to see ABB embracing the shift to a software ecosystem, software defined solutions, and AI capabilities.