Director for Digital Transformation of SO UES Stanislav Terentyev - on the priorities of digitalization and the features of import substitution

Stanislav Terentyev: Digital transformation for the Society as a whole is the transition to a qualitatively new level of integration of digital technologies into the processes of operational dispatch management, ensuring the operation of markets and planning the development of the Russian energy system. In the information and technological part, it consists in radically replacing the objects of the physical component of the DC infrastructure (dispatch centers) with digital ones with standardization at the level of architectural approaches and implementation, taking into account regional features, of a virtual software-defined infrastructure. The special role of the System Operator - a legally defined organization that monopolistically carries out the operational dispatch management of the UES of Russia - to be a "think tank" and the main ideologist of the introduction of effective technologies - is not only preserved, but also strengthened in the process of digital transformation.

Since the functions performed by the company in the power system are infrastructural, the transition to innovative digital models of interaction with other industry players is possible only if it is ready, one can say "digital maturity" of the subjects and objects of the electric power industry. Significant efforts made by us to implement projects such as the standardization of information exchange using CIM (Common Information Model) are aimed primarily at jointly achieving the level of digitalization by all industry participants, which can have a significant economic and social effect, as well as ensure geostrategic security of the functioning of the unified energy system.

In other words, the digital transformation of the industry and the System Operator is interdependent, and for this reason must be intertwined.

Stanislav Terentyev: We have every right to paraphrase your question to a diametrically opposite one: "How far can the electricity industry afford to get ahead of other industries in the implementation of digital innovations?" Read the history of the industrial use of information technology and, I think, be surprised when you find out that initially everything that is called "IT in industry" was invented in the electric power industry. The first domestic computers, on which the most complex calculations were carried out since the late 50s of the 20th century - from atomic research to the state planning plan, were designed under the guidance of electric power specialists and were originally intended for calculating the electrical modes of power systems.

There's nothing really surprising about it. All over the world, the electricity industry is one of the most important components of the country's economy, the development and sustainable activities of enterprises, the quality of life of the population and the security of the state as a whole depend on its functioning. Therefore, on the one hand, the electric power industry should be one step ahead in order to anticipate the needs of other industries in everything, including technological shifts, but on the other hand, when introducing new technologies, especially affecting the operation of the main equipment, power engineers have no "right to error," the implemented solutions require a certain, sometimes long time of testing and testing.

Of course, the electricity industry is quite conservative, especially when it comes, for example, to the life of people or the safety of equipment. But this conservatism is based on impeccable knowledge of the subject and a deeply rooted ability to bear full responsibility for decisions made.

Stanislav Terentyev: Digitalization of the process of operational dispatch management in the electric power industry based on advanced technologies for managing power systems and IT has been carried out continuously since the emergence of the very concept of "IT," as I said. The development of digital technologies in CO occurs naturally with a corresponding change in our internal business processes and relationships with other industry entities in the following main areas:

• implementation in dispatching centers, of which we have almost 60, of geographically distributed ICs, including operational dispatching control systems, adaptive systems for monitoring stability reserves, centralized systems and local AP systems, systems for monitoring and analyzing transient modes in power systems based on vector measurements;
• digital modeling of the power system and its elements on the basis of open CIM standards using national standards of the GOST R 58651 series and standards of the International Electrotechnical Commission IEC 61970 and IEC 61968 in the business processes of the Company and in cooperation with the subjects of the electric power industry of the EIM UES;
• development of OREM (wholesale power and capacity market), system services market, including aggregated demand management. Separately, I wanted to note that the initiative to digitally manage the demand of consumers in the retail market is a vivid example of the real digitalization of the company and the industry, where one of the effects will be a reduction in consumer costs for the purchase of electricity and capacity;
• development of technologies for remote control of equipment of power plants and network facilities from the dispatch center, which will reduce the time of production of operational switches, that is, finding the power system in an unstable or suboptimal state by 10 times (from 30-50 to 5 minutes). Almost an order of magnitude reduces the duration of regime restrictions and the time of forced deviation of power plants from the planned load schedule for the implementation of regime measures.

Special attention is paid to the creation and continuous development of information security. Due to the fact that the management of the UES of Russia is based on the continuous exchange of technological data between electric power facilities and our dispatch centers, the company's active position in digitalizing its activities is one of the main drivers initiating the processes of deep automation of electric power facilities and large electricity consumers.

Global trends and conditions for the development of the electric power industry in Russia set a strategic framework for decision-making by all companies, including CO. At the same time, each company has its own conditions and interests that specify its actions aimed at implementing the strategy. On the one hand, the variety of specific solutions supports the variability and adaptability of the system as a whole. On the other hand, the consistency of these actions between the main "actors" under the leadership of the Ministry of Energy is the key to the strategically verified development of the entire industry.

As an example, when developing digital transformation programs for SO, PJSC Rosseti, PJSC RusHydro, joint initiatives were developed to use remote control technology, unification of information exchange based on the unified CIM information model.

Stanislav Terentyev: In accordance with the rules of the company's tariff regulation, the preparation, coordination and approval of the investment program covers a 4-year period. All initiatives included in the digital transformation program are on the list of IT projects as part of the company's investment program. Given the wide experience of the System Operator in testing for the subsequent use of new digital technologies and the existing high digital maturity of technological processes, the budgets of 2020 and 2021 are commensurate, in the future a smooth increase in costs is planned to preserve tariff solutions.

Stanislav Terentyev: I believe that the challenge posed by epidemic restrictions has only accelerated the processes of transformation of companies using digital technologies. In companies with a high level of readiness of infrastructure and software solutions, the transition to remote work took place quickly with the possibility of using almost the entire set of corporate systems.

A system operator is a clear example of such a company. Since for us digital transformation, even when it was not so called, has always been an organic component of constant work to improve technological and non-technological processes, we did not even have to seriously revise our plans in this direction - we were ready.

Stanislav Terentyev: Readiness is ensured by a set of technical and organizational measures, including financing in network and generating companies.

To date, at the facility level, process parameters of functioning are not fully recorded, transmitted or displayed in digital format. The current equipment of power plants, networks, switching, measuring and distribution equipment, protection and automation terminals with a traditional secondary circuit architecture prevents the implementation of the idea of ​ ​ deep digitalization of power facilities and full use of the advantage of digital technologies on existing equipment.

The presence of a large number of disparate local systems for monitoring process parameters does not allow a comprehensive assessment of the technical condition of the equipment, which does not allow predicting a change in its state over time.

However, projects are already being implemented or planned within the framework of developed strategies for the digital transformation of industry companies to digitalize the main areas of activity.

Stanislav Terentyev: Everyone understands that it is necessary to import substitution. But there are a number of issues that prevent this process from proceeding quickly. There are separate software packages that are analogues of foreign products, but there are no complex solutions that allow implementation without any additions, which usually lead to an increase in the cost of implementation and ownership. Separately, it should be noted that the functional, technical and operational characteristics of the manufactured domestic solutions do not contain information on the compatibility of products with previously installed elements.

It is difficult to replace when domestic analogues on the market do not meet functional requirements and are not integrated into the operating infrastructure. However, we see that the list of products that are difficult or yet impossible to replace is constantly decreasing, because import substitution processes have been going on since 2014 and the line of Russian solutions does not stand still, the market is changing dynamically, new items appear, something is improving, something appears or disappears from the Unified Register of Domestic Software.

By the way, if we talk about the registry, then we are faced with one problem of the methodological plan. Everything that is developed in the Russian Federation, but not included in the register, is considered foreign. But we in the System Operator do not buy ready-made software for technological processes, it simply does not exist, it is unique and is developed by our order. And it turns out that we incur costs during the development process during the year or more, but we cannot call the software product made by the Russian developer "domestic" and report on the predominant use of domestic software included in the register. And we are discussing this issue in the process of coordinating the digital transformation program with those in charge of the Federal Investment Fund - the Ministry of Digital Science and the Ministry of Energy.

Taking into account the uniqueness of the RS functions, any information and control system before being put into commercial operation in JSC SO UES is necessarily tested, tested, checked for compliance with the declared functional, technical and operational characteristics and compatibility with the existing infrastructure. This process takes from one year or more.

At the same time, when choosing and introducing new ICs, priority is given to Russian technical solutions. To improve the efficiency of the Company's activities in the field of ensuring the planned and phased consideration of the possibility of replacing foreign products with equivalent Russian products, improving the quality and efficiency of decisions made to implement measures for import substitution in the field of information technology of JSC SO UES, a Commission on import substitution in the field of information technology was established, which coordinates the testing of Russian solutions and their implementation in business processes.

Within the framework of its activities, plans of measures for testing and testing domestic solutions available on the market are annually approved and implemented, following the results of which, if a positive conclusion is adopted, work is organized to implement them.

Stanislav Terentyev: The automated dispatch control system (ASDU) of the UES of Russia is built as a hierarchical system that ensures the solution of operational dispatch control tasks at all levels of dispatch control. The most important task of ensuring the stable functioning of the ADCS is to create a distributed software and hardware infrastructure, as well as communication channel infrastructure that provides information exchange between dispatching centers and electric power facilities of operational technological information (television measurements, television signals, remote control commands) and non-operational technological information (oscillograms of emergency events, settings for RPA devices, results of determining the locations of damage on overhead lines, etc.).

The main sources of technological information for the ADMS, as well as software and hardware complexes that implement the execution of remote control commands generated by the ADMS at electric power facilities, are automated process control systems (APCS). Traditional solutions for the integration of PCS in the ADMS provide for the use of information exchange protocols IEC 60870-5-101/104.

The disadvantage of this solution is the need to manually configure the composition of transmitted and received data at facilities and in dispatch centers, which, with large sets of data, can be associated with personnel errors, lead to inaccurate telemetry data, and a decrease in the reliability of control systems in the UES.

The digital transformation of control systems should be aimed primarily at improving the reliability of the operation of the EDMS of the UES of Russia, including the exclusion of the possibility of errors arising during the adjustment of information exchange. This can be achieved by automatically generating information exchange settings based on the harmonization of information models used at electric power facilities and dispatch centers.

The first steps have already been taken - proposals have been formed in the expert environment for the application of the standards of the GOST R 58651 series "Unified Energy System and Isolated Power Systems. Electric Power Information Model. " The fundamental standards of this series were put into effect in 2020, they defined a unified format for the exchange of regulatory reference information in the electric power industry. A number of standards for private information models are under preparation and discussion. Implementation of solutions provided by GOST projects will allow:

• ensure harmonization of the information models of the PCS of the electric power facility and the APCS in relation to the process information available in the PCS;
• implement automatic configuration of information exchange of operational and non-operational process information based on data contained in the information model in the ADMS;
• completely eliminate errors in setting up information exchange within ADMS by automating setting up information exchange protocols.

The proposed solutions will ensure end-to-end integration of the PCS of electric power facilities into the APCS at all levels of operational dispatch control. The implementation of the GOST R 58651 series standards will give a powerful impetus to the digitalization of the electric power industry, will provide a reliable software and hardware infrastructure of the ASDU UES of Russia that meets modern challenges.

Stanislav Terentyev: In the CO, in 2019, categorization was carried out, information systems included in the list of objects of critical information infrastructure (CII) were determined, categories of significance were assigned. At the moment, we are in the process of creating a comprehensive security system for significant CII facilities. Given the rather strong interconnectedness of these processes in the industry, our constant business meetings and discussions with other companies in the industry, I can say that the dynamics of colleagues are similar.

The intensity of the release of new regulatory norms in the field of CII protection is impressive, while these norms are formed in a common way for objects from different industries. This situation leads to the need for iterative study and detail of the order of action in order to comply with such norms. Difficulties arise with different interpretations by companies with which interaction can be carried out within the framework of the functioning of OKII themselves, for example, with joint categorization.

There is an increase in expenses and it is due to the specifics of the requirements. However, it is often a difficult task to distinguish measures emanating from the assignment of objects to CII from the total flow of costs within the framework of information security processes, since we, as supporters of an integrated approach, try to add them to a harmonious connected system.