Ecuador's Transmission System (SNT) is integrated by 60 substations, 44 of them have a Substation Automation System (SAS) and 5 of these SAS are obsolete. When a failure of any protection/control device occurs in an obsolete SAS, the lack of spare parts drives the substation to a critical state that could compromise the service availability since a proper substation operation cannot be accomplished. In this regard, TRANSELECTRIC set up the plan to update around 20 substations which are within its field of action. To this end, retrofit engineering of a transmission line-bay under the IEC 61850 guidelines is developed and includes the standardization of signals, the reengineering of SAS components, and the standardization of the substation operator interfaces. This engineering is then applied to INGA 1 Bay (Pomasqui Substation) and its evaluation is accomplished in laboratory by the emulation of such bay with the designed automation system. To validate the proposed retrofit, the architecture and dataflow of Pomasqui Substation are emulated as well, to evaluate the automation system performance under practical operational scenarios. After the experiments, the results show the feasibility of the proposed retrofit.
