Alexander APOSTOLOV

IEEE Fellow, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, Distinguished Member of CIGRE

“Impact of IEC 61850 Edition 2 on the Smart Grid”

About the Speaker

Dr. Alexander Apostolov received MS degree in Electrical Engineering, MS in Applied Mathematics and Ph.D. from the Technical University in Sofia, Bulgaria. He has 40+ years’ experience in power systems protection, automation, control and communications.

He is presently Principal Engineer for OMICRON electronics in Los Angeles, CA. He is IEEE Fellow and Member of the Power Systems Relaying and Control Committee He is past Chairman of the Relay Communications Subcommittee, serves on many IEEE PES Working Groups and is Chairman of Working Groups C2 “Role of Protective Relaying in Smart Grid”.

He is member of IEC TC57 working groups 10, 17, 18 and 19 and Convener of CIGRE WG B5.53 ”Test Strategy for Protection, Automation and Control (PAC) functions in a full digital substation based on IEC 61850 applications” and member of several other CIGRE B5 working groups. He is Distinguished Member of CIGRE.

He holds four patents and has authored and presented more than 500 technical papers. He is IEEE Distinguished Lecturer and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa. He is Editor-in-Chief of PAC World and Chairman of the annual PAC World Conference and the annual PAC World Americas Conference.

About the Tutorial

The first part of the course concentrates on the definition of the Smart Grid and its components. It highlights the requirements for reliability, security and efficiency. It later concentrates on the requirements for integration of the different renewable distributed energy resources and their impact on protection, automation and control systems.

The second part of the course covers the main characteristics of the IEC 61850 standard and then concentrates on the evolution from Edition1 to Edition 2. The changes in the data models, the model hierarchy, the communication services and the System Configuration Language. The changes in the standard that are driven by the needs of different Smart Grid related applications are also presented.

The third part of the course covers the digital substations as a key component of the Smart Grid. It discusses the benefits of digital substations and gives practical examples of its different applications for the Protection, Automation, and Control (PAC) and how they reduce the fault clearing times in order to support the ride-through requirements for the DERs.

The last part of the course covers the testing aspects of digital substations and distributed wide area protection, monitoring and control applications. It starts with the description of the Quality Assurance Process defined in IEC 61850 Part 4 - from the early IED design phase through acceptance, commissioning and subsequent supervision and maintenance of the PAC system. Later the testing related features of IEC 61850 are described, followed by examples of testing of substation, substation-to-substation and wide-area protection applications.