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Now let's shift to a leading member of that community. Michael, what's Salt River Project's interest and role in the VPAC alliance? Thanks, Carolyn. Before I go into our involvement with VPAC, let me start off with a brief introduction about who Salt River Project is. SRP is a not for profit water and electric utility stationed in the Central Arizona region. Our mission is to provide reliable, affordable, and sustainable water and power to our customers. We have a diverse generation portfolio, which includes a mixture of of coal, natural gas, nuclear, and renewables such as hydro, solar, and wind. Right now, we own about three hundred substations. They're a mix between transmission and distribution, and we have over one million electric customers. On the topic of VPAC, SRP sees the VPAC solution, addressing some of our largest challenges our pack organization is facing today. Some of these benefits we see in the technology, we've been a large proponent, and we are driving to lead the development of the standards and adoption within the industry. Our protective relay fleet is aging at a rapid pace, making it difficult to maintain the life cycle replacements along with the increase in capital work that our groups are seeing. A large population of our relay fleet are still electromechanical with many of these being over forty years old. So we see virtualization as one solution to increase the life cycle replacements of these devices. From a design perspective, VPAC systems offer a very standard templatized approach. The overall reduction in the wiring, the materials, and the components all influence an overall shorter design process. Complexities of specific stations that would require unique hardware configurations may be accommodated for within the software now. A virtualized solution offers operational flexibility, which will be required to continue to adopt the changes in the grid. SRP has been seeing unprecedented growth in both greenfield and brownfield projects along with huge amounts of DER coming online. Instead of having to perform all the work to incorporate additional devices and relays into the substation, working through the process of design, the settings, the field wiring, and the commissioning process, Most of these large changes can now be added via software once the virtual system's in place. So the flexibility derived from this will be essential for us to keep up with the growth of, all the different demands that we're seeing in the future. So with the digital architecture, we will see a significant increase in the amount of data that's available to us. This opens up new avenues for applications for us to use, use this data, like using AI for analytics, such as predictive fault analysis. This is something that previously wasn't available to us. With all this new connectivity, we'll have a suite of additional tools that will increase our management and visibility in addition to being able to troubleshoot issues remotely. From a business perspective, we see virtualized systems offering safer worker working environments with less exposure to the secondary circuits and assets outside of the control house. We're routinely estimating the cost for a VPAC system, which showed the decrease in labor in both capital and operational expenses with these solutions. In addition to this, we foresee the ability to implement higher levels of redundancy throughout the entire system and new protection schemes becoming available to us that weren't practical with conventional relays today. SRP has had a strong involvement with the VPAC alliance since its inception in twenty twenty three and even prior with some of the major players. As of today, Brent Heap, the director of our PAC organization at SRP, is the chair of the VPAC alliance. My colleague, Anthony Sivison, chairs the software group, and I'm the chair of the cybersecurity working group. We have we also have many subject matter experts from SRP involved within the different working groups helping to contribute to the overall cause. Personally, I'm glad that the alliance saw cybersecurity would play an important role within the VPAC architecture and that we emphasize it's important from the start. The solution overall will offer enhanced flexibility and visibility over our conventional systems while providing tools not previously available to us to aid in the maintenance and the security of the systems going forward. The cybersecurity group today has over thirty members and we meet on an active, weekly basis. Cybersecurity is a very broad subject. There's numerous specifications and guidelines and different documents that are available. Perils can be made between industrial automation control systems and the VPAC systems that we're dealing with today. For that reason, our group has been converging on IEC six two four four three as one of the most relevant standards to what we're trying to achieve with virtual virtualization today. Six two four four three is a series of standards that define the requirements and the processes for not only implementing but maintaining electronically secure systems all to help prevent and mitigate and prevent cyber attacks. Our document is less of a specification, but more of a set of guidelines and suggestions. We follow the entire life cycle of a VPAC system from the planning, through procurement, through design, testing, operating, and even retiring these systems. We make many references to six two four four three and many other standards that we do see relevant today. What we hope to produce at the end of all this is a document that utilities, integrators, and vendors can take to understand what capabilities should be available from these systems in order to keep them secure. Each utility will have its own security posture, and we're trying to keep that in mind as we make our recommendations. Thanks, Michael. This is such important work. And clearly, Salt River Project is committed to moving to virtualization. I'm so glad to see the VPAC is addressing cybersecurity from day one. Can you share a little bit more about how far along in the VPR journey Salt River Project is, and what does the future look like for you? Sure thing, Carolyn. SRP does have quite a history with our journey within this segment. We've had years of involvement with research and development in organizations like IEEE, EPRI, Seagray, and IEC. We conducted a centralized protection and control pilot with ABB's SSC six hundred hardware appliance in twenty twenty. Shortly after that, we piloted a virtual protection proof of concept in our lab, which proved that the technology could work. Fast forward to twenty twenty three, we took a more formal approach to our proof of concept, which now covers an entire VPAC system architecture. So our new pilot now encompasses, the IO translation layer through the networking, the server hardware, the hypervisor, and then all the applications that reside on this. The pilot scope covers a single SRP twelve kV distribution bay, which includes a sixty nine to twelve kV transformer, one main breaker, and five feeder breakers. We do have a thorough test plan, but I'd like to point out the performance benchmarking portion was one of our large focuses over this last year. We wanted to compare how our current day's standard microprocessor relay packages would compare to a virtualized system. The diagram you see here shows a high level view of our test setup, which shows our microprocessor relays on the top and our virtualized system on the bottom. We have test sets capable of injecting secondary signals into both systems at the same time. We then measured the time it would take for either system to process these signals and then make a decision and for the resulting output contact. This was fed back into the test set, giving us the means to compare the response time for each system. As you can see the virtualized system does have more components that the signals would need to traverse than a conventional system would. Testing included simulation of tens of thousands of faults of different protection elements including transformer differential, bus differential, instantaneous overcurrent, and time overcurrent. As I just mentioned, we were testing the round trip timing from when either system received the secondary signals to receiving the output trip contact by our test set from either system. So the results on this page are from our transformer differential testing. It shows that the virtualized architecture on average performed about half a cycle faster than our current microprocessor relay package. Testing of all our elements was just as promising with the virtualized architecture typically being faster or within a half a cycle performance when compared to our conventional systems. We also found that the VPAC architecture overall had more consistent results with less outlies outliers than our conventional relays. Moving forward, we are adapting changes for our architecture based on the lessons learned from our initial lab pilot and the new products or features that have become available. Some of these changes include adding a third server into our cluster for redundancy during patching and for hosting management applications, further segmentation of our networks to improve our security posture, implementing a storage area network, which will help us take advantage of some of the high availability features provided from the hypervisor. We plan on utilizing sixty one eight six nine dash nine streams to be more efficient and flexible with our sample value streams. Edge cloud orchestration will be used to increase the flexibility with our deployments and the management of the systems once they're installed. And then we will use hardware in the loop testing to scale our lab pilot without the need to procure additional merging unit hardware in the lab. So our next steps include a field pilot in twenty twenty five. This will include piloting a virtualized system in parallel with our current standard for a single twelve kV bay. In parallel to this we'll be moving forward with our next phase of the lab pilot. This involves an expansion of the lab pilot from a single twelve kV distribution bay to include one of SRP's full typical sixty nine kV distribution substations. This includes four twelve kV distribution bays, four bays of sixty nine kV breakers in a breaker and a half scheme, and then the sixty nine kV bus. While engaged in our pilot, we'll be continuing our work within the industry and with our partners to continue to drive standards and adoption. Thank you so much, Michael. Salt River Project is certainly a thought leader here and elevating the industry. Let's finish up with one final question for Ken. Can you speak to what specific hardware solutions that are software enabled Advantech provides for substations? Yeah. So I you've heard three great experts in this space who are building the software infrastructure, and testing it, for the substation environment. And what Advantech provides as the market leader in industrial computing is purpose built substation solutions that are built on open architectures, and they're all certified to IEC sixty one eight fifty, which was mentioned several times, including fanless servers, that are built without moving parts, provide extremely long life cycles, which we're also, committed to provide as an industrial compute supplier. As well as because we've talked a lot about what you can do in the future, we also have scalable servers where we have lots of extra processor cores that go above and beyond what you what you need for BPAC today, to give you headroom to add lots of other features. And all of these servers are built to talk over standard Ethernet networks using the sixty one eight fifty, architecture. That includes Ethernet switches built for the substation as well as, specialized IO cards that provide parallel redundancy protocol, which is a key part of a high availability system within the substation network. Thank you so much, Ken. Really great information from all of our experts today. Thank you for joining us for today's discussion. We began by examining the challenges grid operators face and how substation virtualization addresses these critical needs. Next, we introduced the VPAC Alliance, a collaborative industry group dedicated to driving the adoption of virtualization in grid operations. As a tangible example of their efforts, we explored how this alliance of industry leaders has developed a hardware and software defined solution to tackle one of the most pressing substation challenges, protection, and incorporating AI at the grid edge. I'd like to extend my gratitude to our expert panelists for sharing their valuable insights and to you, our audience, for your time and engagement. If you'd like to learn more about substation virtualization or have questions about today's sessions, please visit us at advantec dot com. To follow or contribute to ongoing work of the VPAC Alliance, visit VPAC Alliance dot com. For Advantech, I'm Carolyn Swan. Thank you for being part of this conversation. I look forward to seeing you again in our next InnoTalk. Until then, take care.