Recently, the Southern Power Grid Company revised and issued the "Technical Guidelines for Distribution Automation Planning and Design" (hereinafter referred to as the "Guidelines"), clarifying the technical roadmap and planning requirements for distribution automation construction during the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, promoting the transformation of distribution automation from effective coverage to self-healing and efficient power restoration, and providing important support and standard basis for the construction of new distribution systems.
"The Guidelines, as the guiding core standard in the company's distribution automation planning and design field, has played an important role in promoting the high-quality construction and practical improvement of distribution automation. With the advancement of the new energy system and the new power system construction, the demand for accelerating the update and application implementation of relevant standards has become more urgent," a relevant official from the Strategic Planning Department of the Southern Power Grid Company introduced. Focusing on the goal of improving power supply reliability, the company fully implemented the deployment requirements of the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration, based on national and industry standards in the field of distribution automation, fully drawing on the experience and achievements of relevant units, and completed the revision of the "Guidelines" over a period of nearly two years.
Overall, this revision is based on the background of the new power system construction, adheres to systematic planning and lean planning, follows the principles of demand orientation, differentiated policies, main distribution coordination, moderate advancement, one-time selection, and step-by-step implementation, and presents four notable characteristics:
First, adhering to the "differentiated" planning concept, achieving precise policies, precisely matching the power supply area with the construction mode, switch placement principles, and uniformly implementing the "local coordination of the main station" mode, and converting the effective coverage of self-healing to a rigidly quantified constraint, precisely enhancing the power supply reliability of the distribution network;
Second, leading the evolution of digital and intelligent technologies, systematically improving operational efficiency, clearly defining the evolution of the main station based on cloud-edge integration and main distribution integration architecture, deepening the application of plug-and-play, remote operation, and BeiDou satellite time synchronization, laying a solid foundation for panoramic perception, and enhancing intelligent and lean levels;
Third, enhancing panoramic control capabilities, actively adapting to the new power system, clearly defining the comprehensive adaptability requirements for distributed power sources and new entities, promoting the realization of minute-level "four capabilities" for distributed resources, supporting flexible interaction and efficient consumption of source-grid-load-storage;
Fourth, building a high-resilience security guarantee system, enhancing risk prevention capabilities, configuring backup main stations and multiple tunnel communications, ensuring business continuity in extreme scenarios. Strictly implementing the requirements of "security zoning, network dedicated, horizontal isolation, and vertical authentication", building a deep defense system, promoting the application of domestic cryptographic algorithms, and comprehensively enhancing the intrinsic safety.
In the future, the Southern Power Grid Company will conduct comprehensive and coverage-based special publicity and training for distribution network planning personnel across the entire network in batches, ensuring that relevant personnel accurately grasp the requirements of the new standards and promote their full implementation; at the same time, closely connecting with the "15th Five-Year" new distribution system planning results, continuously strengthening the coordination of primary and secondary systems, standardizing terminal deployment and enhancing communication support and coordinated control capabilities, insisting on synchronous planning and construction of secondary systems and primary grid structures, and providing solid support for the high-quality development of the new distribution system. 
(Extracted from the Arctic Star Power Network)