Currently, global utilities must distribute energy through secondary substations at the lowest possible cost to both consumers and businesses. However, secondary substations face the challenge of operating with various types of legacy equipment from different vendors. While some legacy devices are digital, others are electromechanical, and each has its own hardware and firmware. This complexity, coupled with the increasing penetration of distributed energy sources, necessitates a completely new approach.

The goal of the SSP reference architecture is to accelerate the creation of an open, secure, and interoperable standards-based architecture to address the technical and business challenges utilities face worldwide. Designed to reduce capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX), as well as shorten time to market for utilities by digitizing secondary substations, the flexibility offered by virtualization on a common platform also facilitates the deployment of new technologies at the network edge to address emerging use cases.

The proposed reference architecture is fundamental to increasing visibility at the edge, enabling networks to operate using databases and overcome the challenges posed by the growing penetration of distributed energy sources (DES). To promote digitalization in the electricity sector, Iberdrola will support the pilot program to validate hardware and an end-to-end solution, thereby accelerating the digital transformation of the electricity sector.