IEC 61400-25: Communications for monitoring and control of wind power plants

IEC 61400-25: Communications for monitoring and control of wind power plants

Worldwide standard for communication between wind energy components as wind turbines or wind power plant servers and SCADA Systems that monitor or control the energy production.

Key features

• Interoperability between SCADA systems and controllers from different vendors
• Independent of applications or hardware solutions
• Vendor independent configuration based on standard XML files
• Standardized data models for easy description and access to the information
• Standardized controlled way to define model extensions to the system
• Reduce integration cost and data harmonization effort

DOCUMENT ORGANIZATION

Standard information model

IEC 61400-25 defines an information model with several logical nodes that hold the information of the wind turbines, meteorological station and complementary active and reactive power functions in the wind power plant.
Any vendor using this standard series must use the logical nodes predefined selecting the data objects available in their model.

The device information model structure is a hierarchy where the naming and the structure is defined.

Predefined extension rules

Although the standard defines hundreds of data object, the vendors can define their own data objects following the standard defined extension rules and using the common data classes available in the standard.

Different communication profiles

Each communication protocol can fit better in different environments. The IEC 61400-25 application can run using different communication profiles:

How a device can implement different communication mappings

Multi-mapping-iec-61400-25-gateway-project

Different communication interfaces

The standard does not identify the location of the communication interface with a wind power plant.

Two different approaches are used in the practice:

1.- It can be the located at the wind turbine level providing independent access to control each wind turbine.

2.- It can be located at the wind power plant level providing access to all the wind turbines though a unique access point. The communication between the Wind Power Plant Server and the wind turbine is user specific.

IEC 61400-25 User group

The main goal is to assist users with implementing the IEC 61400-25 standard. It provides

• Access to workshops and the implementation guidelines.
• A Reference server implementation to validate client developments.
• A forum to discuss how to improve the standard and the services to the users.

More information is available on the web site: https://use61400-25.com/

ENSOTEST is a company that develops test automation tools for IEC 61850 protocol. UCA International Users Group.