News at STRI
March 31, 2010 - STRI hosts the first interoperability test for wind energy communication
IEC 61400-25 is the first international communications standard designed especially for wind power applications. IEC 61400-25 is based on IEC 61850, which over the last five years has revolutionized substations automation. The new standard for wind power applications includes both standardized names and models of wind plants components such as turbines and rotors, as well as maps of this data to several different protocols.
Between March 23rd and 25th a workshop was held at STRI in Ludvika with 20 participants from 5 manufacturers of PLC (Programmable Logic Controllers), 4 manufacturers of SCADA and test clients as well as some observers from interested power companies like Vattenfall and Statkraft.
The meeting was arranged by the user group "USE 61400-25 Communications for monitoring and control of wind power plants". In a spirit of cooperation and technical consensus on the standard unique benefits participants worked together to demonstrate that this standard is here to stay and provides a solution to control and monitor the wind plants and wind farms in an interoperable way. Most interoperability problems that arose during the meeting could be resolved on the spot and all the participants agreed that this activity was both rewarding and necessary. On April14th results of the interoperability workshop will be demonstrated at the User groups meeting in Arnhem, Holland. At a demonstration five different manufacturers of PLC equipment will simulate one wind turbine each that is monitored and controlled by two different SCADA systems.
The Interoperability Workshop was an important milestone towards open access of data from wind plants. The workshop proved that the IEC 61400-25 products work and are available today!
The participants of the interoperability workshop were:
Vattenfall Utveckling AB (Sweden)
STRI AB (Sweden)
Channel Partners (Holland)
Triangle Micro Works (USA)
Mita-Teknik (Denmark)
Statkraft (Norway)
KEMA (Holland)
Ingeteam Technology (Spain)
XEMC Darwin (Holland)
Bachmann Electronic GmbH (Germany)
Repower Systems (Germany)
Multibrid (Germany)
ARC Informatique (France)
ABB Substation Automation Products (Sweden)
