Alstom Grid acquires smart substation provider ASAT Solutions

Last December Alstom Grid announced it had acquired Canadian Smart Grid technology company ASAT Solutions - a strategic move to offer integrated substation data management solutions for utilities and industrial customers worldwide.

ASAT Solutions Inc., now part of Alstom Grid’s Substation Automation Solutions (SAS) Product Line is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and has been delivering automation products, services, and engineered solutions since 2000.

It is a Smart Grid technology company that specializes in managing, securing and delivering substation information for utility operation, maintenance and asset management applications. Their solutions enable electrical and industrial customers to leverage information to improve their operations, network efficiency and reliability. Typical customer situations would be those planning to modernise their substations with both Remote Terminal Unit (RTU)-based and IEC 61850 standard-based architectures.

Today, ASAT products are operating successfully at the sites of major utilities in North America, as well as in other national utilities around the world, including in Asia, who appreciate the competencies of ASAT’s highly experienced automation engineers.

Key benefits
ASAT products extend the current Alstom Grid SAS product portfolio with compact, optimized solutions for RTU-based architectures that are attractive to electrical and industrial markets worldwide, particularly in North America and Asia Pacific.

It also provides new solutions for secured data integration and data management for those willing to aggregate all substation non-operational data for online condition monitoring purposes. They are a perfect fit to Alstom Grid’s DS Agile digital control system and the MiCOM protection relay range, with a seamless evolution path from conventional to digital and on to a Smart Grid environment.

The combination of Alstom Grid’s and ASAT’s products creates an unrivalled substation automation solution offering that can satisfy the needs of the global electrical and industrial markets.

The combination of ASAT technical and engineering expertise and SAS worldwide presence, will allow customers and users to access advanced substation modernisation and digitization technologies, while benefiting from the local project, delivery and support capabilities from the Alstom Grid network.

These products are optimised for substation modernisation where RTUbased architectures are predominant.

They also support architectures based on the IEC 61850 standard, which is increasingly demanded by utilities, and others, such as DNP3.

Moving forward
ASAT Inc. and Alstom Grid SAS teams are now working together to ensure business continuity and service to customers. Full integration is now in process, a fact that could be observed at the recently held DistribuTECH exhibition and conference at the end of January in San Diego. And customers can now benefit from the added value of the merged product lines.
 

The ASAT offering

The ASAT solutions that slot neatly into the Alstom Grid offering consist of a suite of multifunction servers and software applications that include:

• A communication gateway between the substations and the control room SCADA using IEC 61850 and DNP3 protocols;
• A communication gateway to intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) such as protective relays, measurement devices, RTU I/O, using a variety of communication protocols, in cluding IEC 61850;
• Cyber security features;
• Web access, local HMI with substation monitoring functions;
• Substation Asset Condition monitoring;
• Programmable logic control.