Some Strong Utility Trends for 2019 and Beyond
by Matt Cole
Major trends are happening within the electric power industry that are affecting the electric power grid. There are changes taking place with many power utilities and their stance on the typical power generation mix.
Many electric providers are making changes to their power portfolio by decreasing their demand on fossil power and nuclear generation; moving towards cleaner and greener power sources with renewable resources, such as: natural gas, wind, solar and energy storage. As the efficiencies increase and installation costs decline for these renewables; this makes these generation assets much more attractive for future utility investments.
Some of these major utility trends will continue to evolve in 2019 and beyond.
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Distribution Utilities Now Affected by NERC CIP Regulations
by Matt Cole
As NERC CIP's regulations and standards continue to evolve with the recent approval of CIP-003-7, new compliance regulations will affect the low voltage distribution providers. Previous CIP standards were considered only for voltage suppliers delivering power at transmission level voltages (100kV and above).
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Is Your Legacy SCADA System Secure?
by Matt Cole
For the electric power industry and other service sectors, Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition (SCADA) has performed a crucial role by allowing better decision making through operating, controlling, monitoring and maintaining critical control systems.
With Smart Grid (SG) and Distributed Generation (DG) gaining more popularity results in more 3rd party stakeholders demanding access to utilities' SCADA system. Some utility SCADA systems are older legacy systems that are in dire need of replacing in order to have: a more secure system, access to the latest vendor security patch updates, and to allow for better functionality, etc.
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Cybersecurity Considerations for Power Substation SCADA Systems Using IEC-61850 Communications
by Matt Cole & Others
When including security controls into a SCADA system design, it is sometimes difficult to separate design
goals from security requirements. The foremost goal for a SCADA system is to provide protection,
automation, and data acquisition. This paper discusses major
vulnerabilities and cybersecurity considerations that require proper analysis when designing and
implementing a secure IEC-61850 standard-based SCADA system within a power substation.
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Recommended Solutions to Major Security Challenges Facing OT & IT Personnel within Smart Substation Environments
by Matt Cole & Others
The OT and IT convergence are a reality due to the integrated and complex computing networking and communications taking place within OT
environments. This paper reviews some of the major security challenges facing OT and IT convergence with power utilities, particularly within smart grid (SG) and smart substation environments.
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The Importance of Protection & Controls (P&C) and IEDs
by Matt Cole
Protection and Controls (P&C) engineering and design is extremely important in power grid protection and coordination especially with the use of intelligent electronic devices (IEDs). Proper P&C designs and coordination with protective relaying and IEDs is an essential part of electrical power engineering for protecting large expensive power equipment such as: generators, transformers, transmission lines (TLs), power circuit breakers, electrical bus, etc.
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3D CAD Modeling and Substation Design
by the 3 Phase Design Team
3D CAD Modeling and 3D CAD Design enhances the design characteristics in many ways while providing several benefits. Design efficiencies are improved where traditional 2D drawing representations can be easily achieved from a completed 3D design versus manually drawing each 2D representation in CAD. Being able to view equipment, components, and systems in three dimensional space allows almost endless possibilities towards planning, implementation, construction, and manufacturing efforts, which is extremely important in the electric power industry. 3D CAD Design and Modeling is improving and aiding with power substation designs compared with 2D designs ....
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