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Let's now turn to Darren from Tesco Automation. Welcome, Darren. You're a protection engineer. How do you see VPAC addressing the needs of organizations in your line of work? And what are you doing at Tesco to enable this transformation? Hi, everyone. And thanks, Carolyn, for inviting me here today. I'm happy to share my experiences as a production engineer working to modernize power system designs for over twenty years at utilities of all sizes, as well as hyperscale data center providers. Ever since I started in the industry, I've heard about the lack of resources necessary to take care of the grid, whether that's not having enough graduate engineers, the challenges associated with decarbonizing power generation, or the immense load demands triggered from hyperscale data center providers, etcetera, etcetera. Right? There's a whole lot of work to be done, and we engineers need to bring different options to the table on how to build faster and sometimes in less amounts of space. So one idea is to look at what other industries have already done. And so, for example, the IT industry has been using virtualization for decades. Their virtualization technology is mature enough to apply in the power industry now. But transitioning the power industry to virtualization means changing the mindset of designing in hardware to designing in software. When that happens though, like, the, when the dependencies on hardwires is removed, when there's a focus on creating flexible designs and software that can be applied again and again, the resource requirements for engineering, construction, commissioning, they can be reduced dramatically. We all know that software can be copied and pasted. Utilities are already copying logic templates and individual microprocessor based devices. But what does that look like when you really scale it up? And this is what I love about the VPAC Alliance. The VPAC Alliance takes that idea and scales it up so much farther to the point where entire designs are copied and pasted in a manufacture agnostic way. So you design once, you build many, and with less dependencies. Maybe you're looking to add redundancy to a station, apply another copy of the software, and server platform. Maybe you're looking to perform a soak test of a new design. Copy that virtual machine on the existing hardware, make that change, run them in parallel, and see what happens. Need to change out a hardware component? Reuse the manufacturer agnostic code that you already have to make the integration of something different less burdensome. Taking known good software configurations and applying them again and again means better quality because they're less dependent on catching wiring mistakes. It means faster testing because the testing of the software has already been performed, and the replica doesn't need testing. Designing using software, and then you can let the machines do the work for you. Virtualization also has an impact on the physical footprint. For example, if you think of a control house with dozens of panels and each panel containing microprocessor based relays, test switches, control handles, and indications, all of that's taken up valuable space. But by transitioning to a software motivated design, all that equipment can be consolidated into just a couple of industrial grade servers, communicating over a standard Ethernet architecture. So just think about that. The server performance is no longer the bottleneck. That means supporting a big substation upgrade, for example, is just a matter of adding another virtual environment to a server that's already there. The cost associated with any related control house additions is completely avoided. So getting to this point, though, it doesn't happen overnight. It takes training, takes engineering, and it takes testing. Tesco Automation offers services in all those areas with a focus on the sixty one eight fifty international standard. So if you're ready to take that first step towards digitization or looking to continue the journey towards virtualization, we'd love to speak with you. Very useful information, Darren. There is so much going on in this solution. So how do you train people on what sounds like a complex system with multiple components from a variety of vendors? It's it's a it's a tough one. But, first and foremost, it takes a dedicated focus on the end user. Meeting them where they're at and understanding their challenges and key criteria. It's worth noting that the end user is not always engineers. We've we've also helped technicians, operators, managers, IT folks, and many more. We are focused on the end user to make their experience with this digital transformation a positive one, and we help get their feedback into the hands of vendors and standard committees to further improve the experience that next time around. Second, we we've attained a deep knowledge of the IEC sixty one eight fifty and other related standards through our work on standards committees and industry participation. And that's allowed us to effectively teach not only what the standard contains, but also the intent behind the standards and where they're going next. Third, we've established relationships with all the major vendors, including Advantech, to showcase manufacturer interoperability with their equipment, and and we're able to use that platform to provide feedback for improvements. Through this partnership, we've actually built a one of a kind mobile digital substation platform arranged to mimic a real life substation environment with a transformer, a bus, feeder protection, along with merging units communicating their digital streams of information to these relays. We've assembled all this equipment into crates that we can ship wherever the users need us. This unique platform allows us to show folks that interoperability between vendors works today. Additionally, we give the folks attending our training a hands on experience using the tools to configure it for themselves and thus reinforce the content prevent presented from the six twenty fifty standard. The latest addition, to our training course offering is particularly exciting and relevant to this audience. This is a brand new course that covers the fundamentals of VPAC and testing vpack solutions using hardware in the loop developed on the core tenants of sixty one and fifty. Here, all the protection relays applied in our mobile digital substation design are placed in a VPAC environment running on an Advantech server, and the merging units are simulated using a real time simulation equipment. The real beauty here is that the entire setup, it fits in one mobile twelve rack unit case. What's particularly great is we get to showcase the value Tesco automation brings in integrating these pieces together, like the clocks, the network switches, the merging units, but also those lesser known pieces like real time simulators, server technology, and hypervisors running virtual machines and virtual networking. So if folks wanna learn more about our training offering, I would encourage them to visit our website at sixty one eight fifty university dot com. Excellent resources for our audience to tap into, Darren. Now you've talked about the training component. Let's dig a little deeper into the integration of these systems. How would a utility go about integrating into their substation? Yeah. If possible, please work within your company to integrate resources both in the IT and the OT, and get them to collaborate together in this endeavor. I've been a witness as to what is possible when actual networking engineers and IT specialists work hand in hand with folks like me in the protection side. The design possibilities are truly next level. So, you know, again, as a protection engineer, I can understand that hesitancy around deploying new technology into mission critical facilities where reliability is paramount. Ultimately though, protection engineers, they need to be comfortable and confident with the systems that they are specifying. So one saying that rattles around my protection mindset is don't use what you don't test. So to get protection engineers to get comfortable and to get confident then, we need a way to test these systems in a repeatable fashion. And this is where hardware in the loop testing with real time simulators provides an advantage. By creating a model of your power system that's capable of simulating actual primary currents and primary voltages they would see in the real world, that same data stream of information can be fed into that VPAC system. What's even better is a series of test cases can be created and then scripted to run and test the virtualized system against a given scenario, whatever you dream up. Now now after you have that, you have a baseline set of tests that can be used as a comparison to any changes that are made to the VPAC system. You know, whether they're logic changes or protection set point changes or, heaven forbid, firmware changes, along the way. You can do that regression testing, and you can perform that testing quickly and repeatedly to get you that high level of confidence, once the solution is deployed in the field. What we've seen is that virtualization is also just it's it's it's coming faster than most anyone expects. That spark is there. I, along with my Tesco team, have integrated this technology already to showcase this a working solution, and I I hope it gives you hope that it's possible to buy this today. To anyone faced with the challenges of aging infrastructure and building out at hyperscale and just generally doing more with less, VPAC is the fastest way to get going, and Tesco Automation is happy to help you wherever you are on your digital journey. This is really inspiring, Darren. Your energy is in is wonderful. And we can tell that this is a major shift in paradigm. I'm so glad to see the educational component Tesco brings to the table, and I'm confident your expertise will come in handy for all of the utility community.