As we approach the next decade in the 21st Century we are finding that our infrastructure is disintegrating as it is aged beyond our ability to repair, maintain and renovate. Bridges that are over one hundred years old for example. With the cost and lack of American expertise from the engineer to the iron worker, our knowledge of these systems has either retired or died off.
In the field of electrical power distribution, we are finding our grids that were intact and operable approaching more than a hundred years old, and sadly the technology that controls this grid is approaching one hundred years old as well. The control technologies and field instrumentation were based on hundred year old technologies as it was designed to the needs of heavy machinery and light bulbs alone. These traditional devices are not able to meet modern energy demands, increases in distributed energy sources or changing grid requirements and standards.
Basic Electrical Engineering Terms
As such our current grids strain under the demand of electric vehicles, computers, modern communications such as the internet and fluorescent lights, quickly evolving and changing to LEDs. To understand the challenging and changing field of electric power distribution we need to get a handle on some terms used by electrical engineers.
• ASIC – Application Specific Integrated Circuit – are customized for a particular use, rather than a general-purpose device.
• FPGA – Field Programmable Arrays – are much more agile devices, many interfaces with SCADA systems and can be field programmable. Other words unlike ASIC, they can be programmed on the fly to provide customizable monitoring and control of electrical circuits. Formally used to prototype ASICs, the modern FPGA are bypassing the 500 MHz performance barriers, making them much more flexible that the single use and purpose ASICs. Their parallel architecture is not limited to the number of processor cores that are available. They do not rely on an operating system but minimize reliability concerns with true parallel execution and deterministic hardware dedicated to every task. Each independent task is assigned to a dedicated section of the chip and function autonomously without being influenced by processes occurring in other logic blocks.
• IEDs – not the improvised explosive devices of military origin, but Intelligent Electronic Devices.
• LED-light emitting diodes – modern lighting
• SCADA-Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition – a programmable language used to control industrial processes locally or at remote locations. Extensively used by the power distribution industry. Combines not only control logarithms but monitoring and data acquisition duties as well.
Benefits of Intelligent Electronic Devices
The advantage of modern programmable intelligent devices that monitor and control power distribution is that this intelligence and decentralized decision making is based on the new distributed data acquisition. Another is the two-way communications that is facilitated by the new devices. Flexible because these computer remote controlled devices provide unprecedented data gathering giving wide situational awareness of the grid. They are aware of node changes and disturbances on the grid as they occur. IEDs on the smart grid provide control and instrumentation by FPGAs. There is provided a convergence of multiple functions devices into a single unit, lowering costs.
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FPGAs and the other intelligent devices will play an important part in power distribution as we move away from traditional hardware centric devices to devices that utilize and leverage remote computerized control and operational monitoring. Call Advanced Electric Solutions Corp for an energy audit and custom recommendations today!
