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Substation Automation Systems (SAS) offer powerful, fast, and viable ways to design, automate, and implement substation protection, control, and monitoring functions in modern transmission and distribution grids. Today's SAS -more than ever- rely on the adoption of IEC61850 as a worldwide standard for interoperability and dependable peer-to-peer and substation communications. Being based on the Ethernet computer networking technology, the reliability issues associated with latency in 61850-enabled SAS is of a design consideration. Unpredictability is the most important challenge for latency assessment. This paper discusses the background framework for latency evaluations in SAS by... 

Electrical post insulators are important components of electrical substations since any type of failure in such insulators leads to the breakdown of the local network. Although the electrical substations are often in service condition, any horizontal excitation due to the earthquake, or any extreme event, may cause lateral deformation and damage to the post insulators. Hollow composite post insulators, a new and evolving technology, have a very complex mechanical behavior due to their materials and connections. To date, the design of such post insulators has been based on the limited test results available in the literature. Most of experiments have been conducted on small-scale specimens... 

Short circuit current is one of the major threats for power system stability. Power system should have the ability to detect and clear these faults within a specified time. The protection system can clear the faults only if the interruption capability of the circuit breakers is higher than the fault level. Expansion of the grid and installation of new power on the scale that is envisaged will require practical solutions to a number of technical challenges. One of the technical challenges is fault level management as system expansion often results in increased fault levels beyond the design limits of the existing switchgears. Replacing the old equipments particularly circuit breakers with the... 

Historically, the general target of affecting demand via voltage regulation was conservation, i.e., reducing peak demand and/or accumulated energy. In private environments however, profit maximization may take place of conservation, regardless of the social welfare and consumers' costs. This letter aims at highlighting the effectiveness of voltage regulation as a measure to maximize utilities' profit. The new strategy can indeliberately cause more payments for customers. The letter simulates different cases which reveal importance of the role regulatory bodies have to play to prevent unethical actions in private environments. IEEE  

Fast-charging stations are connected to the electric grid and can fully charge an electric vehicle (EV) in less than half an hour. The capacity and location of the charging stations bring the costs to the electric grid operator, as well as to the station owner and EV user. A zonal approach has been proposed in this paper to determine the optimal place and capacity of fast-charging stations. Station development cost and the expected costs incurred by the EV user and the grid operator due to EV charging have also been included in the proposed approach. The geographic characteristics associated with the electric substations, urban roads, and city zones have also been considered in the proposed... 

Electricity companies have been under a great pressure to improve their technical and financial performances in order to survive and thrive in the deregulated environment. Therefore, these companies are seeking for innovative approaches to take the most out of the restricted resources. These approaches inherently concentrate the available budgets to the most critical components. In this regard, prioritizing the system components and identifying the most critical ones play a vital role in the planning and operation of the system. This paper presents a novel approach to prioritize power transmission system components. In the proposed methodology, a criticality factor is defined and implemented... 

Secure operation of protective intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) has been recognized as a crucial issue for power grids. By gaining access to substation IEDs, intruders can severely disrupt the operation of protection systems. This paper develops an analytical reliability assessment framework for quantifying the impacts of the hypothesized integrity attacks against protection systems. Petri net models are used to simulate possible intrusion scenarios into substation networks. The cyber network model is constructed from firewall, intrusion prevention system (IPS), and password models, which are three types of defense mechanisms for protecting substation networks. In this paper, two main... 

Substations and switching stations are critical segments in an electric power system. Their impacts on system operation and the consequential effects of their components failure are usually more dominant in overall power system reliability. There is always a degree of uncertainty in the practical input data used in reliability analysis. This paper presents a conceptual possibilistic approach using fuzzy set theory to manage the uncertainties in the reliability input data such as failure rate, repair time and operation of protective devices. Suitable fuzzy numbers are proposed for components reliability data. Load of feeders are also represented by fuzzy numbers and their impact on ENS...