The role of FPGA in smart grid system

1. SMART GRID SYSTEM
COMPILED
BY
ENGR. S. O. ADIGUN

2. WHAT IS POWER GRID SYSEM
• Today, electric power distribution is
made possible by the power
distribution grid, a system of
transmission mediums that allow
electricity to be transferred at
different voltages from the point of
generation to our homes.

3. Fig 1: Power Grid System

4. • This system came to be as a result of
industrialization and meeting the electricity
needs of a growing (and westward-bound)
population in the United States. In the early
1870s and 1880s, Direct Current
(DC) systems were popular. Because it
operated with a uniform voltage from
generation to use, DC systems were
integrated only in factories and small
downtown urban centers which had
favorable economies of scale. Sadly, this left
95% of residents in the United States

5. • Alternating Current (AC) was the first
major development to change that.
Pioneered by the French during the
1860s, it was not until 1886 in Great
Barrington, MA that the first full AC
power system in the world was
developed. AC power had the advantage
of step-up and step-down transmitters,
which allowed for the manipulation of
voltage and as a result the development
of a grid which could reach everyone in
the United States.

6. • Generation by multiple sources became possible
at sites distant from that of the final user. A
windmill, for example, could generate power by
spinning a turbine.
• That power’s voltage would be “stepped-up” to
travel a long distance to its final user, and then
“stepped-down” to a more appropriate 120V for a
household lamp. Multiple generators could then
be connected over a large area, reducing
generation costs and enhancing economies of
scale.
• The sad part is, the history essentially stops
there. The last major development in our grid
was around the turn of the 20th century.

7. CHALLENGES ON OUR PRESENT
POWER GRID
• Presently, the grid is facing a multitude of challenges
that can be outlined in three categories.
1. First there are infrastructural problems due to
the fact that the system is out-dated and unfit to
deal with increasing demand. As a result, network
congestions are occurring much more frequently
because it does not have the ability to react to such
issues in a timely fashion. Ultimately such
imbalances can lead to blackouts which are
extremely costly for utilities especially since they
spread rapidly due to the lack of communication
between the grid and its control centers

8. 2. A second flaw is the need for more information
and transparency for customers to make optimal
decisions relative to the market, so as to reduce
their consumption during the most expensive peak
hours.
3. Finally, a third problem is the inflexibility of the
current grid, which can’t support the development
of renewable energies or other forms of
technologies that would make it more sustainable
• In particular, the fact that renewable sources
such as wind and solar are intermittent poses a
significant problem for a grid that does not
disseminate information to control centers
rapidly.

9. • All of these problems are
addressed by the smart grid
through improved
communications technology, with
numerous benefits for both the
supply and demand sides of the
electricity market.

10. Definitely there is a need for
Smart Grid System
ok let’s go
WHAT IS SMART GRID SYSTEM
• A Smart Grid is an electricity network that can
intelligently integrate the actions of all users
connected to it – generators, consumers, and
those that do both – in order to efficiently
deliver sustainable, economic and secure
electricity supplies.” (EU Report, 27)
• Electronic power conditioning and control of
the production and distribution of electricity are
important aspects of the smart grid

11. Stakes of Engineers in Designing a
Smart Grid System
• The current power infrastructure is in need of
an update for better efficiency, reliability, and
safety. Standards organizations and engineers
have risen to the challenge, promising to solve
many problems with the grid.
• The so-called "smart grid" embodies many of
these solutions. Implementing a smart grid
system offers significant design challenges to
the engineer, as these systems must have
longevity, from not only from a reliability
standpoint but also performance and
component availability.

12. Differences
• A modern power delivery architecture has
power generation, transmission and
distribution (T&D), and end users. The smart
grid differs from legacy systems in many ways,
including incorporating renewable energy
sources, energy storage, and instrumentation
for consumer metering and grid performance
analysis

13. Fig. 2: Overview of a smart grid

14. STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT
• Prior to the mid-1990s, no global power grid
standards existed that enabled energy providers
to deploy interchangeable equipment. To
facilitate improved control and flexibility, the grid
needed transforming from a single network of
transmission lines to a pair of networks of
communications and power distribution.
• The International Eletrotechnical Commission
(IEC) developed a set of core standards (IEC
61850)that addressed substation architecture,
communications, and security, as well as timing
and synchronization.

15. Challenges of IEC 61850
• in 1995 with collaboration between the IEC and
the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
on a new way of thinking about substations and
robust communications networks.
• Since the inception of IEC 61850 incremental
capabilities have been added to broaden the
standard's functionality, including areas like
hydropower, PV power plants, and distributed
energy resources.

16. • From an internal substation infrastructure
perspective, the standard facilitates
interoperability, flexibility, and control with a
network of substation equipment communicating
over fibre-optic cable.
• While this network solves a number of problems
associated with flexibility and interoperability, it
creates new challenges as well. For example, the
fiber-optic network (and its accompanying layers
of communication hardware and communication
stacks) replaces low latency copper wire
connections, and to facilitate this IEC 61850
provides support for special messaging that
bypasses layers of the communication stack to
reduce latency(response time).

17. • Substation automation standards, like IEC
61850, specify that no single point of failure
causes a system malfunction and substation
architectures employ redundancy for all
mission critical components.
• Additionally, substation system engineers
must meet failure recovery time
specifications. IEC 61850 prescribed the use of
IEC62439-3, Parallel Redundancy Protocol
(PRP) [see Fig. 3] and High-Availability
Seamless Redundancy (HSR High-availability
Seamless Redundancy (HSR)(see Fig. 4)

18. Fig. 3: Overview of a Parallel
Redundancy Protocol (PRP) network

19. Fig. 4: Overview of a High-Availability
Seamless Redundancy (HSR) network

20. FPGA makes Power Grid smart
As how let’s see
• In order to make the smart grid "smart," power
grid equipment includes a combination of signal
processing, communications management, and
dedicated hardware blocks.
• To accomplish this, systems typically use a DSP, a
CPU, and an FPGA.
• As the capabilities and levels of integration of
FPGAs have increased, several smart grid
applications have incorporated an FPGA or an SoC
to implement all of these blocks, affording better
flexibility, reliability, maintainability, and cost.

21. Examples of FPGA used in smart grid
• An example of FPGAs being used in a smart-grid
applications is the 4-port Ethernet switch with support
for HSR, PRP, and IEEE1588-2008 offered by Altera and
its smart grid design partner, Flexibilis (see Fig. 5).
• IEC 62439-3-compliant implementations of PRP/HSR,
support for IEEE1588-2008, and requires no external
memory. Other substation automation equipment
(e.g., a transmission relay, etc.) can integrate this
implementation with other functions on a Cyclone V
SoC.
•

22. Fig. 5: PRP/HSR switch architecture.

23. • This SoC FPGA features a dual-core ARM
Cortex-A9 processor operating at 800 MHz,
and flash, RAM, caches, GPIO and
communications ports commonly used in
smart grid systems.
• The FPGA fabric provides smart-grid
developers a variety of benefits, while affords
opportunities for integration, performance
acceleration, and upgradeability.

24. Benefits of FPGA in Smart Grid
1. Reliability, performance, and time to market
• Today's FPGAs and SoCs possess several qualities that
help enhance smart grid equipment reliability. High
levels of integration reduce the number of components
required, thereby enhancing MTBF/FIT rate
performance. Features like error correction code (ECC)
memory coverage and the use of multiple processors
help to insure reliable operation.
• Some configurations implement a small RISC core
within the FPGA fabric, while others simply lock down
the level-1 cache of one of the two ARM Cortex-A9
processor cores and employ the dedicated core for
diagnostic purposes.
• An FPGA helps support customer's time to market
requirements by available industry-standard CPU cores,
state-of-the-art development tools, off-the-shelf IP.

25. 2. Maintainability and longevity
• The ability to reconfigure and upgrade
products, in production or in the field, is
critical, particularly as standards evolve over
time.
• FPGAs help mitigate this problem by providing
scalability and reconfigurability to implement
product updates that go beyond a simple
software change.

26. THANKS FOR LISTENING