Building a highly reliable smart grid

Excellence Information Technology Co., Ltd. is a national enterprise specializing in the R&D and production of industrial Ethernet products, as well as the formulation and implementation of industrial Ethernet solutions. Its excellent products, including industrial Ethernet switches, industrial-grade transceivers and converters, and industrial-grade data gateways, are widely used in industrial environments such as rail transportation, metallurgy, power, coal mining, shipbuilding, and docks. In the past few years, Excellence Information Technology has strategically focused on the rail transportation industry. Through years of effort, its excellent products, especially the TSC series industrial switches, have gained widespread recognition in the domestic and international subway industry, and it is now the preferred domestic brand for industrial Ethernet in the subway and high-speed rail sectors.
With the increasing clarity of the national smart grid concept, Excellence Information Technology Co., Ltd. has also defined the power industry as a top strategic priority. In fact, Excellence already has many successful application cases and mature solutions in the power industry. Two issues need to be discussed in the process of completing these projects:
The first question is, "What kind of network do we want to build?"
This involves a currently hot topic: the smart grid. Regarding the smart grid, can it truly evolve to the point where the power grid replaces the data network, transmitting data signals while simultaneously transmitting electrical energy? Will our computers eventually only need to be connected to the power line to access the internet, eliminating the need for a network cable? We shall wait and see. At this stage, the smart grid we are proposing actually relies on data communication networks to organically connect related links such as power generation, transmission, transformation, distribution, consumption, and management. While transmitting electricity, it collects real-time electricity demand and feedback through real-time data transmission, thereby guiding the distribution and supply of electricity, thus enabling more rational use and allocation of energy. This is the first layer of meaning of "smart." The smart grid is now a vision being envisioned globally, and our country, building upon the foundation of "smart," has proposed an extension of "robustness." Robustness refers to our network's fault tolerance and self-healing capabilities, enabling automatic fault convergence. A robust smart grid actually encompasses two aspects: first, the robustness of the power grid itself; and second, the robustness of the communication network upon which the power grid depends. Here, we will mainly discuss the second aspect: the robustness of the communication network. In fact, there are already relatively mature solutions for enhancing the robustness of communication networks: redundancy. For example, six network devices can be configured in a ring network. Between any two points on these devices, there are two physical links that can connect them: clockwise and counter-clockwise. Based on the characteristics of IP networks, especially the underlying IP network, only one of these paths is in use, with the other serving as a backup. The backup link only switches to use when the backbone link fails, thus achieving effective convergence of network faults. This redundancy scheme already provides a solution for enhancing the robustness of communication networks, and the introduction of industrial Ethernet further optimizes this solution. Because the self-healing time of a ring network built with civilian networks is from a few seconds to a minute, while the convergence time of industrial Ethernet is in the millisecond range—for example, the convergence time of a ring network from Zhuoyue Xintong can be controlled within 20ms—normal data communication is basically unaffected by network interruptions. Besides the redundancy design of network links, fault-tolerant configurations can also be achieved by using primary/backup switching for network devices, thereby ensuring the availability of the entire network.
Beyond a solid foundation, we also need to consider network security. Current communication networks are increasingly dominated by IP. However, the openness and widespread availability of IP networks mean they have always been accompanied by viruses and attacks. To isolate insecure factors from the network, a common and thorough solution is to separate business networks, management networks, and general office networks into different layers, placing them on separate physical networks to physically isolate insecure data. These networks are then securely connected through a professional application platform.
Overall, we have relatively mature solutions for intelligence, robustness, and security. However, there is one issue we cannot ignore: reliability. We all know that relay protection requires network clock synchronization at the microsecond level. This requirement can be achieved using current high-precision time protocols, but we must regretfully acknowledge that achieving this requires the network to function perfectly. As mentioned earlier, current Ethernet redundancy convergence time remains at the millisecond level, a technical challenge that Ethernet technology cannot yet be completely resolved when applied to the power industry. We firmly believe this challenge will be overcome in the near future, but at this stage, we can only minimize the probability of network failures and thus avoid clock synchronization problems during network convergence. The method is to use highly reliable equipment and links to build a highly reliable network. In fact, through scientific design, equipment reliability can be continuously improved. For example, by using highly reliable components to replace ordinary civilian product components, or by specifically increasing the adaptability of equipment to the power industry. This topic can be explored in many ways; if you are interested, you can visit the Zhuoyue Xintong website for more information. Below is Zhuoyue's official information.