Latin America Protective Relay Market in Electric Utilities Market Size

Latin America Protective Relay Market Analysis

The Latin America Protective Relay Market in Electric Utilities is expected to reach a CAGR of 4% over the forecast period 2021- 2026. The concepts of protection relay systems for operation within a Smart Grid infrastructure is catering as a new trend. According to Smart Energy International, the total smart grid infrastructure market in Latin America will cumulatively be USD 20.1 billion over the period 2018-2027, with smart metering representing just over half of this amount. This represents the high demand in the future smart grid projects.

• Increasing adoption in renewable capacity additions is driving the market. Latin America and the Caribbean holds enormous renewable energy implementation. IRENA's recent 'Future of Solar Photovoltaic' report underlined that the region's solar energy capacity could grow by the factor of 40 by 2050 to more than 280 gigawatts (GW). Countries such as Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru, and the Dominican Republic are the regions where the governments initiate to implement renewable power solutions. This implementation further holds a strong demand for the protective relay in the coming future period for the protection of feeders, busbars, and high voltage substations.
• The adoption of the IEC 61850 standard for substation automation drives the market. Early substations comprised of mechanical relays and meters, which barely supported recording and provided no means of the communication. Fault recorders were capturing information majorly in the form of paper charts, so reading and analyzing the information was not a straightforward process.
• IEC 61850 addresses necessary hardware requirements for a substation-grade device and defines a communication language that reduces the amount of wiring in the protection system as all the wires between CTs (Current Transformers), PTs (Potential Transformers) and protection relays can now be merged into one Ethernet cable. The IEC61850 projections are primarily due to the rapid adoption of the standard in Latin America, where large substation automation projects are planned. Eaton provides modern IEC 61850-based substations in Latin America communicating digital information between sensors and relays through Sample Values or GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented System-Wide Events replace the conventional hard-wired logic) protocols. A digital relay also generates and save log, event, and oscillography files.
• However, the impact of COVID-19 is affecting market growth. The diversion of potential investment in P&C (Protection & Control) equipment and other grid modernization equipment, systems, and services will be minor (approx less than 4% lower shipment values in 2020 from 2019 levels) unless the current COVID-19 situation continues to affect manufacturing supply chains in the region. According to IDB (International Data Base), since late March 2020, electricity demand has been decreasing in all countries, showing negative change rates in the two last weeks of March, which further reduces the protective relay demand for those who need to purchase new relay.
• Moreover, for the future project plans, the pandemic provides no harm to the suppliers as well as players. For instance, in April 2020, Enel announced that the pandemic currently poses no material disruption to its renewable project supply chain and expected to meet its 2020 energy targets. The company planned to move forward with its strategy to add an additional 14.1GW of renewables by 2022, which includes projects in Chile and Brazil.