Interoperability Profile Recommendations for Hydrogen Assets

Communications play a crucial role in enabling the control and sensing of assets in a smart grid architecture. Many protocols are available in the industry for interoperability. One such protocol is IEC 61850. IEC 61850 is used in the power industry to allow interoperability among the different intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) in a substation. In addition to substation automation, IEC 61850 can be used to enable interoperability in distributed energy resources. This work aims to enable an IEC 61850-based client and server for hydrogen assets. The proposed approach will be critical to enabling an IEC 61850 client to sense and control hydrogen assets. This report presents the necessary steps that need to be taken to start interoperability coding from scratch until deployment in an embedded system device. The report first presents background information on electrloyzers, fuel cells, and inverter technologies. Specifically, the report discusses some sensing and control needs of these assets based on open-source information available on these assets. This information is then used to develop IED capability description (ICD) files. These are developed using substation configuration language, and they contain description of the devices. Finally, these ICD files are used in an IEC 61850 client and a server, and the successful communication between the two are presented. We provide an example code for using these ICD files that can be used in a generic microcontroller.