Ormazabal is one of the worldwide leading companies specialized in the electrical network with a strong commitment to reliability and innovation, driving the development of the electrical network to respond to the future energy needs.

Ormazabal Protection & Automation has two principle activities:
• Research, design and development of electronic products for the products of the business units of Ormazabal.
• Design and development of applications and engineering for the protection, automation, and remote control of the medium voltage distribution network and especially for transformer and distribution substations, providing products and services to our clients, including turnkey installations.

OPA is has a vast expertise in project management and electronic product development in the electrical sector. Ormazabal Protection & Automation, additionally from having access to the laboratories of Ormazabal Corporate Technology, has its own fully equipped electronics laboratory. Medium Voltage to Low Voltage Transformer Substations are one of the key points of the ongoing energy revolution, where the introduction of the so called IED (Intelligent Electronic Devices) is giving the possibility to access to big quantities of data.

WebServices: Focusing on Medium Voltage automation, real time protocols such as IEC 60870-5-104 allow the dispatch centre to operate the grid, have access to the status of the electric components and gain observability of the measurements of the installation. Year by year, more and more automations are being installed, therefore new needs show up when big quantities of installations want to be managed. In order to help how to manage an increasing demand of installations is where the development of different “Webservices” is presented to this project. The main goal is to define a data exchange between automation devices installed in the Transformer Substation and servers installed in premises to manage easily hundreds of devices. The project will develop services to gather the status and configuration of the installations, the collection of all the timestamped events and the possibility to perform firmware upgrades. All these developments should allow the operators to control and manage deployed devices easily.

Smart Transformer: The increasing penetration of renewable energy systems into Medium Voltage and Low Voltage grids, together with the upcoming electric vehicle is due to change the way power distribution grids are operated and planned. Among smart grid technologies, the smart transformer is a key flexibility enabler due to its ability to deal with voltage fluctuations, both in unstable Medium Voltage and on Low Voltage networks. In this project, various smart transformers will be installed and the low voltage stability provided to end customers will be analysed. In order to enhance the intelligence of this device, during the project it is expected to connect the transformer control system to the dispatch centre, so that all the information about the grid status can be available for grid operators.

Low Voltage Board: During the process of integrating electronic devices all over the transformer substation, the low voltage board is a very important equipment to gain full control and observability of the low voltage grid. During the project, various Low Voltage Boards will be installed with current and voltage measurement devices per feeder to develop and create reports about the power and energy transmitted to the line as well as timestamped events per line. All the electronics installed per feeder will be managed by a master device that will send all the gathered information to centralized system. This master device will also have the information of the transformer output, knowing all the power flows of the low voltage lines that could eventually be compared to the data of end customers and locate them per feeder.

Information Exchange: This project will develop and install electronic devices in the cubicles for Medium Voltage automation, smart transformers for voltage control and low voltage boards for complete observability. Each of this electric equipment will be connected to a centralized system to exchange the gathered information. Once these three milestones are completed, the project will analyse all the information generated and will need to define if it is interesting to exchange information between the installed devices. As an example, it is very reasonable to think that the value set by the smart transformer to control the low voltage could be set depending on the grid conditions.