Protective Relay Market Trends

Growth Drivers

• Growing adoption of electric vehicles - As per the estimations of EIA, approximately 10 million electric cars will be sold across the globe in 2022 and are anticipated to rise by an additional 35% in 2023 to reach 14 million. Hence, the protective relay market demand is predicted to grow. This is because safety is the major concern in electric vehicles.
  
  Furthermore, the prevalence of electric vehicle disease has also grown in number. The adoption of protective relays is set to rise since they connect or isolate automobiles from the charger while ensuring user safety by handling dangerous conditions such as ground faults or creepage currents.
   
• Rising integration of digitalization & IoT in protective relay - The development of distributed energy resources (DER) systems has brought about an inevitable increase in the level of complexity of grid operations. However, more mature economies have demonstrated significantly higher densities of DER.
  
  DER integration and management seeks to shift away from human-controlled DER management system software (DERMS) and towards something more comparable to the Energy Internet of Things (eIOT), without any arbitrary upper restrictions on DER density. Thus, digitization provides real-time monitoring, control, and optimization of energy usage and production. Digitalization has an opportunity to sustain the electric grid in numerous ways including advanced energy management systems, growing trading of energy, and more.
   
• Surge in the number of aging electronic infrastructure - The worldwide electrical infrastructure is presently aging and being utilized beyond its original capability. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently published an analysis suggesting that governments and services around the world have to replace or add roughly 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) of electrical grids by 2040 to ensure reliable electricity supply while tackling power sector pollution. As a result, the importance of the protective relay market is predicted to increase. 

Challenges

• Growing complexity in installing a protective relay - The testing and verification of protective devices and arrangements involves several concerns. This emerges since the primary function of protective devices is to function during fault conditions, and these devices cannot be properly tested under normal functioning conditions.
  
  The problem is exacerbated by the rising complexity of protection arrangements, the application of protection relays with significant software features, and the often-utilized Ethernet peer-to-peer logic.
   
• Rising threat of cyber attacks - Recently, the power system underwent a digital shift by combining the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), smart meters, and the Internet of Things (IoTs), resulting in the establishment of cyber-physical power system (CPPS) networks. 
  
  This shift, however, has raised the vulnerability of power system networks to cyberattacks as well as privacy concerns, as management and safety decisions rely primarily on data reliability.
  
  Fluctuations in price of raw materials - The prices of raw materials for protective relays are affected by supply and demand trends. Raw material supply fluctuations may lead to price volatility. Natural disasters, geopolitical disruptions, worldwide emergencies, and economic situations may all have an impact on the supply chain, causing raw material pricing changes.