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From CAD User AEC Magazine  Vol 22 No 7 - JULY/AUGUST 2009

To meet future energy demand, we are going to have to beef up our network of electricity substations. David Chadwick explains how Bentley's Substation V8i will help us plug into the Smart Grid

Now here's a term you are going to become more familiar with over the next couple of years - the Smart Grid! It is a natural progression in the way we distribute electricity, as our energy infrastructure evolves, bringing with it multiple sources and technologies to fulfil our demands for power, which we have to balance against our environmental needs. Instead of the national grid just being used as a direct conduit from the power stations down to your household meter, it needs to handle energy coming in from a host of smaller energy sources - wind turbines, water turbines, solar arrays, foreign suppliers when the demand exceeds domestic supply - and even in the other direction when sophisticated users with their home generators flog the stuff back to the network.

No longer is it sufficient for the thousands of substations on the grid to be used just to convert the megawatts being spewed out of the power stations into bite sized chunks for individual users. Now, they have to be intelligent hubs that can be used to direct and manage the energy requirements and resources of each local area. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it is the substation that is the critical element in the grid. You will live not far from one, unless you live in the remote countryside, and get your power from a waterwheel. It's that thing that occasionally lights up the night sky in late autumn with a blue flash before the area is plunged into darkness. So critical are they, though, that as much as 10% of the power utilities revenues are spent in designing, building, operating and maintaining them! As our energy resources become more complex, we need more of them, we need them to be more sophisticated - and the need to bring the rest of our decrepit and aging substations up to date to meet these requirements (40% of them are believed to be nearing the end of their productive life - as unsophisticated as they might be - and the bulk of the rest are bound to be outdated). The demand for the installation of substations is even more acute abroad, especially in countries like India and China where they are involved in substantial amounts of substation retro-fit, or new construction where, in the case of China, they are commissioning one power coal-fired power station every week.

A large market, therefore, for aspiring substation designers. Every single energy user needs to ramp up substation construction or refurb. Smart grids may be a solution for our energy needs, but they won't exist without an intelligent sub-structure.

SO, WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

The problem is that the tools for designing, building and operating electricity sub-stations have, until now, remained pretty primitive, and disjointed - according to Richard Zambuni, Global Marketing Director for Bentley, design engineers tasked with designing substations access their resources from a number of disparate software products. They are all basically 2D oriented, as well, relying on designers manually cross-referencing schematic symbols between drawings and diagrams, with no facility for error checking or for sharing data. BOMs, cable lists, pointto- point connections all have to be manually created from the 2D drawings, and reports and schedules put together from a mishmash of sources. Any changes have to be manually synchronised, and there are no facilities for collaboration between different contractors. Having to rely on 2D views at all stages of the design process makes them difficult to view and interpret, interference errors are difficult to spot, and, most importantly, increases the difficulty in getting designs approved.

In addition each substation has special design requirements, as they are as likely to be located in the middle of a field, as in a walled enclosure in a housing estate, office or factory complex. Inside or outside, the solution must reflect local needs - vehicular access, or panelled room, plugged directly into a line of pylons, or fed through sub-pavement conduits. It's not surprising a total design solution has been unavailable - until now. For all that is about to change. Bentley has launched a unique product, combining all design disciplines (both electrical design and 3D physical design), and providing a single environment for the design, production, operation and maintenance of substations. Bentley's Substation V8i runs on Bentley's MicroStation V8i and is based on a mature electrical control systems design platform..

It combines the physical and electrical design of a substation, grounding grid design, protection and control systems, lightning protection, auto-generation of reports and schedules, and much else - all capable of being integrated within ProjectWise's engineering content management solution, with integrated tracking and control of engineering changes. Additional intra-operable products support the civil site design aspects of the overall workflow. Eliminating the error-prone and onerous tasks of re-keying data ensures that substation project delivery times can be slashed by as much as 30%, and the production of material requirements (BOMs) improved by as much as 60%.

Engineers don't waste time physically scanning drawings to ensure that they are correct, and project approvals are dramatically improved through the use of 3D visualisation of models, instead of relying on engineers being able to interpret 2D drawings. Bentley Substation V8i is up and running with a user in Europe, and is available now worldwide. It covers the primary functionality needed to design substations but other, intra-operable Bentley products can be used for specific and more specialised tasks such as structural analysis and detailing and design review. Bentley prides itself on its open access capabilities, which allow data generated in other applications to be accessed directly by Bentley Substation V8i. Enterprise integration with other business platforms like SAP is facilitated at the server layer through ProjectWise. www.bentley.com

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