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Substations are the major hubs of todays’ electric grid, the place where energy flows combine, and go in and out.
Making those substations more automated is critical to making them faster, smarter and more able to meet the energy needs of today and tomorrow, while onboarding more renewables and reducing carbon emissions.
Key to substation automation is LF Energy’s Configuration Modules for Power Industry Automation Systems (CoMPAS) project, announced in 2020. CoMPAS should enable grid operators to manage the transition to clean energy by better handling fluctuations in supply from renewable resources and demand from electric vehicles.
The challenge the grid faces today is more and more congestion, says Sander Jansen, Product Owner at Virtual Substation team at Alliander and technical steering committee at CoMPAS. That congestion makes it hard to connect parties to the grid so the industry needs new solutions. The modern substations of the future will not just monitor grid congestion, but will dynamically provide ways to arrest it.
The CoMPAS project focuses on the configuration of substations, which is essential to automation of the actual substation function. Currently, the market contains a lot of tools, which are proprietary to vendors. With more vendor independent tooling and configuration of substations, utilities will have more choice, more interoperability among devices, and substations will be more efficient and responsive.
CoMPAS, announced in 2020, was basically created inside LF Energy with active involvement from RTE and Alliander. The main target for the software is engineering companies or utilities, many of which have expressed interest and are closely watching the project’s progress, Jansen says.
Learn more about CoMPAS here.
