Building the business case for virtualized digital substations

The electrical power grid is rapidly changing with the continuous addition of distributed energy resources, resiliency challenges created by severe weather events, and the policy mandates to move towards net-zero carbon emissions. Investments in adaptive and intelligent grid controls is crucial to enable grid operators at every level to maintain consistent voltages and power quality across the grid. The increasingly dynamic power system calls for additional functionality and flexibility to adequately protect, control, and monitor from center to edge. The energy industry is therefore looking for more efficient ways of addressing these concerns with the long-term view of improving the overall lifecycle strategy of their assets. Virtualized protection, automation, and control (vPAC) concepts play a key role in addressing these requirements in an efficient manner, utilizing the increasing power of modern compute along with the standardized data modeling and communication architecture offered by the IEC 61850 standard. This webinar will discuss the overall benefits of virtualizing the protection, automation, and control functions and other key operational components in the substations, and how to quantify the associated savings and value. You will also hear directly from Utility digital substation leaders on their journey toward testing, validating, and deploying this new architecture and their expected value propositions. Speakers: - Mark Daus – Energy Field Director, Dell Technologies - Anthony Sivesind – Energy Solution Architect, VMware - Kevin Sharp – Senior Manager, Transmission & Distribution Innovation, Southern California Edison - Brant Heap – Manager, Protection and Control Strategy, Salt River Project