#Meinberg #PTP #Telecom #PowerGrid

PTP Telecom Profile in Power Grids

PTP in Substations

PTP Time in substations is distributed using power profiles. There are two profiles defined for power applications: IEC 61850-9-3 Utility Profile and the IEEE C37.238 Power Profile. Both profiles are almost identical with a few special settings in the Power Profile. They are designed for Layer-2 networks, either Ethernet, HSR or PRP. For details on HSR and PRP please refer to one of our previous posts. They use the Peer Delay measurement mechanism; therefore all switches need to have PTP support and are either transparent clocks or boundary clocks.

PTP can be used also to transfer timing from substation to substation. In this case the communication goes to an adjacent substation or to a SCADA network and the Substation gets timing from there. Such PTP inter-grid network can serve also as a failover in case of GPS failing or jamming.