OREANDA-NEWS. December 18, 2012. GE (NYSE: GE) today announced the availability of its latest version of the Universal Relay (UR) platform designed to help customers meet the emerging requirements for improved security, connectivity and interoperability. Customers with an existing install base of UR relays can take advantage of these new enhancements through GE’s upgrade program without the need to incur major capital costs.

GE’s new UR platform provides advanced security tools that support NERC’s (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) recent changes to its Critical Infrastructure Protection plan helping customers improve the security of their electrical grid. To help secure the grid against the increasing threat of cyber-attacks, this UR platform delivers advanced security features include Radius for authorization, authentication and accounting and Syslog for standard reporting of cyber security related events.

This new release helps improve the reliability of customers’ mission critical services that run on a substation’s local area network (LAN). With support for three independent networks, utilities can segregate mission critical services from maintenance and troubleshooting tasks, which prevents potential latency on the network and improves reliability and security.

To reduce configuration and wiring time and help customers reduce deployment time and costs, the UR supports newly emerging industry standards including IEC61850-90-5 and IEEE1588. The IEC61850-90-5 provides synchrophasors over multicast messaging, which reduces the amount of streamed data and bandwidth required for wide area monitoring solutions. The IEEE1588 precision time protocol (PTP) reduces substation wiring and provides high accuracy time synchronization over the substation LAN.

GE’s Digital Energy business is a global leader in protection and control, communications, power sensing and power quality solutions. Its products and services increase the reliability of electrical power networks and critical equipment for utility, industrial and large commercial customers. From protecting and optimizing assets such as generators, transmission lines and motors, to ensuring secure wireless data transmission and providing uninterruptible power, GE’s Digital Energy business delivers industry-leading technologies to solve the unique challenges of each customer.