RT24 UK | Validation of Substation Automation usingReal-time simulator: a Blackstart use case

Despite its long history in the energy sector, substation automation has always been a challenging yet indispensable part of the grid expansion and operation. The increasing deployment of renewable and energy storage systems requires more than ever high level of automation for medium voltage substations. This is because these systems often consist of many individual units which need to be coordinated to provide advanced features, e.g. Blackstart. Such coordination is often complex due to the involvement of various control systems. To tackle this challenge, we plan (our testbed is under installation) to use real-time simulators to validate the automation schemes with real control hardware. This allows us to ensure robust implementation and at the same reduce commissioning and onsite testing effort. In this presentation, I would like to share the approaches that we used to achieve such a high fidelity and versatile testbed.