Integration of multiple Solar / DER Sites to the control center of major US Utility, using IEEE 2020.5 protocol

Customer: American Investor-Owned Utility (IOU) providing gas and electricity

Industry: Electric Utility 

Business Case: 

The US utility - One of the largest in the USA combining Electric and gas utilities, one among top 100 global clean energy providers – wanted complete integration of Solar / DER sites with a capacity of 3MW and higher to the utility control center as per CA Rule 21 mandate. The requirement was to collect the data from multiple types of DER sites which mandated the support for all the available protocols including DNP3, Sunspec-Modbus, Modbus, IEC 61850. The integration with Control Center was planned as per IEEE 2030.5 / CSIP 2.1. The solution was intended for monitoring and control of DER assets to enable Voltage Ride Through, Frequency Ride through, Dynamic Volt/VAR Operations​.

The utility would also act as an approval entity for the IEEE2030.5 Gateway/data aggregator for the future DER asset integration to the utility control center. Any DER asset owner could directly purchase the utility-approved Gateway for the integration. 

The Solution: 

ASE / Kalkitech provided the solution to deploy IEEE2030.5 Gateway/data aggregator at the DER stations which can convert all the common protocols (DNP3, Modbus, Sunspec-Modbus, IEC 61850, etc) at the DER location to IEEE 2030.5 as per the CSIP2.1. The control center could communicate to exchange the data with DER assets in real-time by just using the IEEE2030.5 protocol. The interoperability included function sets of Time, Device Capability, End Device, DER, Meter / Mirror Meter, Log Event, Subscription / Notification, Security, FSA, and Response. The key characteristics of the solution included

• The system provided metering values at any uniquely identified input with the appropriate characteristics. Apart from monitoring DER sites, the system enables DER Control events with start time/date and duration to be executed. ​

• The system was designed to post monitoring information every 30 sec & poll DER Controls at 10 sec.​

• Kalki.io management service was used to remotely manage field gateway configuration/ firmware​.

Key Benefits:

The solution enabled the utility to completely monitor and control DER assets in real-time or near real-time to enable Voltage Ride Through, Frequency Ride through & Dynamic Volt/VAR Operations. This also made the future DER asset integration to the control center as per the predefined set of rules.

Note: The solution is also available as a standard SYNC Gateway package including all the downstream protocols and MQTT & OPC-UA add-ons for the upstream communication.