FRA5 Data Centre — Mercury

FRA5 is a large data-centre development in the Frankfurt region — a two-building, high-capacity campus with Mercury among its delivery partners. The electrical commissioning scope focused on a 12 kV digital substation supporting mission-critical power distribution, where redundancy, fast fault isolation, reliable remote visibility and deterministic automation are conditions of continuity of service. The work joined protection engineering with industrial communications: fast peer-to-peer automation over IEC 61850 GOOSE, and supervisory data integration over Modbus.

• Commissioned protection and automation functions for the 12 kV digital substation serving mission-critical data-centre loads.
• Configured and verified IEC 61850 GOOSE horizontal communication between protection and control IEDs for fast exchange of interlocking, blocking, status and automation signals without relying solely on conventional hardwired contacts.
• Validated GOOSE publisher/subscriber relationships, signal quality and end-to-end behaviour during functional tests, ensuring that peer-to-peer messages produced the correct control and protection responses.
• Read, interpreted and verified Modbus communications between electrical devices and SCADA, including mapping of digital statuses, alarms, measurements and register-based data.
• Diagnosed communication issues by checking addressing, data-type interpretation, scaling, signal direction and consistency between device registers and SCADA point databases.
• Performed end-to-end checks from field IEDs through the communication layer to SCADA visualisation, confirming that events and equipment states were represented correctly for operators.
• Supported the digital-substation commissioning philosophy required for data-centre infrastructure, where redundancy, fast fault isolation, reliable remote visibility and deterministic automation are essential to continuity of service.

This project combined protection engineering with industrial communications. The work covered both fast peer-to-peer automation through GOOSE and supervisory data integration through Modbus, providing a complete path from substation IED logic to operator-level SCADA information.