Companies are increasingly interested in virtualizing electrical equipment because it offers a range of benefits for their operations. Firstly, virtualization reduces the need for physical infrastructure, which results in cost savings, reduced maintenance requirements, and increased safety. In this article, we talk about the benefits of separating hardware and software in Substations.
Virtualization of an Electrical Substation refers to the creation of a digital replica or simulation of an actual substation using virtualization software. Virtualization works by abstracting the hardware from the software.
The separation of hardware and software in electrical equipment has significant implications in terms of design, development, and maintenance. The main reason behind this separation is to allow for greater flexibility, upgradability, and ease of maintenance.
Hardware components are typically designed to be robust and reliable, but they can also be expensive and difficult to modify or upgrade. Separating hardware from software allows for the software to be updated or modified without affecting the hardware, thereby reducing the need to replace expensive hardware components.
Software, on the other hand, can be easily modified or upgraded without affecting the hardware. This allows for greater flexibility in terms of adding new features or fixing bugs in the software, which can be done remotely without the need for physical access to the equipment.
The virtualization of electrical equipment is becoming a game changer. By decoupling hardware from software, organizations can unlock significant advantages, from cutting costs and reducing maintenance to boosting safety. Virtualization minimizes the need for physical infrastructure, offering not only operational efficiencies but also long-term savings.
Red Eléctrica and Elewit are working on the EPICS (Edge Protection and Intelligent Control Solution) project, which aims to create a flexible, scalable, replicable, manageable, programmable, cybersecure and adaptable hardware and software platform that can be used in many different application environments.
With EPICS:
Virtualization can be used to simulate various scenarios such as fault conditions, equipment failures, and load fluctuations, which enables engineers and operators to test and optimize the performance of the substation under different conditions. The benefits for virtualizing are primarily:
While virtualization technology offers numerous benefits for energy operators, there are also some challenges to implementing virtualization in the energy sector. Some of the main challenges include:
Edge Computing plays a key role as the enabler of the solution, as it helps businesses to monitor, manage and control their field assets without causing latency and bandwidth issues, as would happen with fully cloud-based systems.
Barbara offers a Thin Edge Technology to avoid vendor lock in. Its Technology is cybersecure by design and is used in highly critical sites, establishing peer-to-peer interoperability between sites, running automated AI processes in situ, and sharing sovereign data between stakeholders.
Barbara´s interoperable Edge Technology stack incorporates all widespread industrial protocols southbound, freely runs any dockerised process or micro-service concurrently on the same devise and includes all connectivity options northbound. Edge Nodes and their AI algorithm lifecycles are maintained by our cloud-based tool, Barbara Panel, also available as API.
Related content: The challenges and opportunities of Edge Computing for the Energy Sector