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By Doug Peeples

SGN News Editor

Equipped with new technologies to enhance their capabilities, today's smart grid substations have much more demanding requirements for their operations than their predecessors. Symmetricom, a well-established precision timing and synchronization company, has just launched its SyncServer SGC-1500 Smart Grid Clock to meet the needs of those advanced substations for real-time network operations.

Symmetricom VP for marketing and business development Manish Gupta told Smart Grid News the point of the smart grid clock is to offer utilities accurate, reliable and secure timing and synchronization in their critical operations.

He referred to San Francisco-based Pacific Gas & Electric, which is participating with Symmetricom in the launch, and the multi-faceted benefits they will gain from its adoption of the SyncServer. Here is a quick summary of the key benefits.

·         The clock's capabilities give the utility the tools to mitigate outages in a matter of hours or minutes rather than days or weeks.

·         Operational efficiency can be boosted from a typical 85% to close to 100%, a plus considering the constant need to balance supply and demand and the uncertainty of renewable power and other similar concerns like EVs.

·         A one microsecond time stamp on the thousands of messages moving across networks provides the accuracy to make it faster and easier to make sense of all that data. It's a real-time view. And phasor measurement units (PMUs) don't have a lot of value without time stamps at that level of accuracy.

·         While GPS will still be a part of networks, the smart grid clock reduces the need for numerous and expensive GPS installations at every substation and PMU. That alone is a significant plus for return on investment considerations.

·         The SyncServer meets primary requirements for smart grid substations, including IEC 61850, the International Electrotechnical Commission's standards for substation automation design which, again, requires microsecond timing to find and fix potential faults – and the standard's electrical hardening requirements.

·         It also meets the requirements of the North American Reliability Corporation's reliability and security standards for Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP), which mandates very strong security protocols.

·         A rubidium atomic clock option provides holdover capacity if GPS is interrupted. Another option is built-in IEEE 1588 v2 Telecom Profile input.

·         It can be deployed at a substation or a central location.

There is more of course, but you get the idea.

"it's a very elegant way of managing communications across the grid," Gupta said. "The smart grid architecture and related standards require a new approach to timing distribution across the overall network." He added that the company has a lot of experience in providing precise time solutions to the communications, enterprise and government markets as well as utility telecom. "Serving the power utility telecom network over the past 10 years, Symmetricom is ideally positioned to meet the emerging timing requirements of the smart grid."

He added that overall, utilities are moving away from reactive operations like post-event analysis to more immediate real-time management and control of how their equipment and networks function.

Also, it should be noted that the smart grid clock is compatible with older legacy systems.

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Watch a video about the clock >>