EcoPhi slashes substation costs with open virtualisation

EcoPhi has deployed an open source virtualisation platform from LF Energy in live substations and reported substantial reductions in hardware costs, wiring and commissioning time, alongside gains in reliability and predictive fault detection.

The Swedish grid technology company has used SEAPATH, an LF Energy project, as the real-time virtualisation layer in more than 200 digital substation deployments worldwide. The sites include projects in Sweden, the United States and the Middle East.

EcoPhi is a spin-out from Chalmers University of Technology and has received national innovation awards in Sweden.

The company said it has virtualised several monitoring and analytics functions that traditionally sit on dedicated hardware. These functions include phasor measurement, power quality, disturbance recording and partial discharge monitoring. EcoPhi has consolidated them on a unified edge platform that runs on SEAPATH.

The approach targets long-standing challenges in substation design. Utilities typically rely on multiple point devices, each with separate wiring, commissioning and maintenance regimes. That structure creates extensive copper cabling, duplicated hardware and lengthy build times. It also complicates deterministic behaviour for IEC 61869-9 Sampled Values and IEC 61850 GOOSE and MMS traffic under redundancy and time synchronisation requirements.

EcoPhi sought a single virtualised edge environment that could host these workloads while maintaining real-time responsiveness, interoperability and reliability. The company said SEAPATH delivered deterministic performance alongside orchestration, time synchronisation and fault tolerance across both virtual machines and containers.

Cost and wiring cuts

In a 20-feeder substation deployment, EcoPhi reported hardware capital expenditure reductions of between 60 and 70 per cent. The savings came from consolidating monitoring devices into virtualised applications running on an edge server.

The company said copper and field wiring fell by about 90 per cent. It reported rack cabinets and floor space reductions of between 50 and 70 per cent, along with a 40 to 60 per cent cut in commissioning time through the use of standardised software images and remote deployment methods.

Maintenance operating expenditure dropped by 30 to 40 per cent in the reference project, according to EcoPhi. The company said on-site interventions fell by 50 to 80 per cent, while rack power and cooling requirements reduced by 30 to 40 per cent.

EcoPhi estimated that these changes delivered around €1.5 million in substation build-cost reduction per site. The deployment also produced a 40 to 50 per cent first-year reduction in combined capital and operating expenditure and a projected 35 to 45 per cent lower total cost of ownership over five years.

Digital substation stack

The technical architecture combines high-resolution merging units in the yard with a virtualised edge server in the control environment. EcoPhi's QMU 800 merging unit samples up to 2 million samples per second at 24-bit resolution. It supports both conventional current and voltage transformers and low‑power sensors and publishes Sampled Values compliant with IEC 61850 and IEC 61869. The device integrates GPS timing and uses redundant networking.

The CMPC 800 edge server hosts virtualised power quality, phasor measurement, partial discharge, disturbance recording and metering applications. SEAPATH runs as the real-time platform on this server. It provides deterministic scheduling and co-ordinates virtual machines and containers.

EcoPhi uses techniques such as CPU and interrupt pinning and network interface passthrough. The company said this maintained deterministic latency for critical substation functions. The system runs continuous partial discharge monitoring and explainable AI analytics for predictive fault detection. EcoPhi reported meter-level accuracy and no false positives in the reference deployment.

The platform accepts third-party vendor applications. EcoPhi described it as a multi-vendor, open ecosystem for digital substations.

Reliability and prediction

In the 20-feeder site, predictive analytics flagged 90 per cent of predictable faults in advance. EcoPhi said the system avoided 67 per cent of total faults and localised issues with metre-scale precision.

The deployment also introduced continuous zero-downtime partial discharge monitoring with trend analysis and classification. EcoPhi said its virtualised power quality and phasor measurements meet Class A and Class P/M requirements with tighter trigger thresholds than minimum standards.

The company uses explainable AI models in its platform. Those models provide human-readable reasoning alongside fault predictions. The system also combines geographic information system and SCADA data to support transformer capacity analysis and dynamic line rating calculations.

EcoPhi said software-based upgrades now replace many hardware interventions as standards evolve. The company expects that shift to reduce lifecycle cost and operational risk in digital substations.

Roadmap and pilots

EcoPhi plans to extend its SEAPATH-based approach from monitoring and analytics into protection and fleet-level management. The roadmap includes containerised protection functions such as distance, line differential, transformer and busbar protection.

The company is also working on automation from single-line diagrams through to configuration files and orchestration for one-click bay deployment. It is testing enhanced determinism features based on time-sensitive networking, data plane development kit and redundancy-aware self-healing orchestration.

Cyber security work on the roadmap includes measures aligned with IEC 62351. EcoPhi lists MACsec and IPsec, signed software images and zero-trust access as focus areas. It is also developing deeper observability for latency and jitter service-level agreements and trace-based root cause analysis.

The company intends to expand predictive analytics and introduce digital-twin replay for protection setting validation. It is preparing tools for multi-site fleet management and brownfield retrofit projects and is targeting formal certification under IEC 60255, electromagnetic compatibility standards, KEMA and UL.

EcoPhi is already running field pilots that test line differential protection over 5G networks. The pilots mark the next stage in its work on converged protection and control based on SEAPATH.