The current power grid technology has been using for over 100 years in which it has very low efficiency accounts 67% power lost in total power generation resulting big economic lost. In order to fulfill the “Copenhagen Climate Summit” goal reducing 20% to 40% of green house gas by 2020, smart grid network by two way digital technology has become essential to deliver, store, allocate for resilience energy integrating from solar and wind power.

Advantages of Smart Grid
A basic power grid consists of several parts. A power plant generates power and increases the voltage by a transmission substation to improve the efficiency of transmission. The transmission substation also allows it to connect from long distance, high voltage transmission to local, lower voltage distribution. At the local power substation, transformers reduce the voltage to a lower level for distribution to commercial and residential users. It can also provide power to Industrial users which often require a higher voltage and perhaps also have special security of supply considerations.

Since environmental issues are extremely important and major energy resources are non-renewable, how to produce, allocate and manage power effectively has become an inevitable issue nowadays. The smart grid system, which integrates power generation, transmission, distribution, advanced metering infrastructure, power storage, data control and analysis software, and home area network, provides the best solution to address this problem. According to University of Oxford’s research, when compared with traditional power grid, the smart grid system is able to save each household an average 5~15% of power costs. If 50% of American households saved 10% of power costs at the same time, the energy saved would equal the energy consumed by 8 million cars. Smart grid not only saves energy but increases reliability and transparency.

The Ethernet network is one of the most significant infrastructure components used to construct the smart grid and the quality of network is the key factor that affects the operating performance. Lantech products help to build up a highly integrated and reliable network system for smart grid. Another benefit of an Ethernet-based smart grid network is convenient installation and maintenance which results in both cost and time efficiency.

Take a power substation for example - via an Ethernet network constructed by Lantech products, Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) are able to connect with a Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) and satisfy all management needs. The RTU collects and sends data to a central control room, which may be located a long way from the substations which make up the Transmission/Distribution system.

Network Managers have complete control of remote IEDs and are alerted to changing system conditions. When an incident occurs, the nature of the problem can be quickly determined via a Human Machine Interface (HMI) and appropriate corrective action is able to be taken, without having to send personnel to the remote substation. Often corrective action is taken automatically without human intervention.

Data for monitoring the status of the operating environment, such as temperature, humidity, pressure, communication, operating efficiency, access control system, smoke detection, and other unexpected accidents is easily collected and analyzed.

IEC 61850 & Other Features
Equipment in a power utility substation must operate reliably in the vicinity of strong electro magnetic fields (EMI) and may be exposed to voltage surge and ground potential rise during line fault conditions. This harsh environment demands specially hardened reliable network infrastructure to support the IED’s. Lantech provides managed switches that comply with the latest IEC 61850 & IEEE 1613 standards which define specifications for operation in the substation environment covering EMI/RFI e.g. from inductive load switching, lightening, electrostatic discharge, interference from portable radio handsets, ground potential rise resulting from high current fault conditions within the substation, and a variety of other EMI phenomena commonly encountered in the substation environment.

One of the most important features of IEC 61850 is the ability to transfer events immediately with Security and Dependability - Generic Object Oriented Substation Events (GOOSE) is a control model defined by IEC 61850 to transport critical events such as intertripping, over substation networks. Based on VLAN and priority tagging, GOOSE group messages are securely accessed within VLAN groups and being priority serviced in the network with a as the GOOSE messages demand to be transmitted with a maximum delay of 3ms. Additional managing functionality including VLAN, CoS, QoS, IGMP, LLDP, LACP and IGMP are the top priorities for power and utilities network applications.

To ensure long term reliability in critical industrial environments, each of the Lantech products has been tested extensively to comply with free fall, shock and vibration stability requirements. The IP30 metal housing also provides a robust protection for the products. The IEC 61850 series models are designed for extreme environments with an operating temperature range of -40°C to 85°C.

Ease of management is another top priority for power and public utilities applications. Lantech products provide several management choices, including web-browser, telnet, CLI, and our own Windows-based utility Lantech-View.

To prevent network failure the Lantech Pro-Ring system encompasses s X-Ring, Central Ring, Dual Ring, Couple Ring and Dual Homing, providing minimum network recovery time. X-Ring is a self-recovery ring protocol operating in less than 10ms for up to 250 switches. Dual Ring and Couple Ring ensure network recovery protection between two X-Ring groups, while Dual homing is used to back up the X-Ring groups when connected to the upper layer or the core switch.

With all the above features, Lantech products provide the best options for applications, not only in power generation, but also for use in other public utility facilities such as desalination plants, fresh water and wastewater treatment plants. Lantech hardened switches provide the ideal cost effective and secure network solution especially for diverse widely distributed networks such as wind farms and solar generation.

Regardless of the energy source, be it coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, wind, or solar, Lantech products provide a total network solution, integrating data transmission, line protection, status control, and surveillance. /p>