A novel retrofit concept for enabling smart secondary substations

Dominating driving forces for increasing automation in all levels of distribution network are the need to improve the reliability of the supply and the quality of the voltage, as well as the requirement to improve the operational efficiency of the network company. In addition, the increased deployment of distributed energy resources makes network operations harder to manage. In this scenario, smart secondary substations will provide a useful approach for planning and upgrading distribution networks. The paper presents a systematic approach to increase automation by introducing retrofit approaches in existing secondary substations cost-effectively and future-proof manner. Three such retrofit approaches are have been presented in this paper.