Digital Substation is an engineering publication focused on IEC 61850 automation, protection systems, and digital grid intelligence.
In March 2025, Salt River Project commissioned the first confirmed production deployment of virtualized line differential protection using Routable Sampled Values over MPLS WAN, with ABB SSC600. The WAN-connected virtualized relay proved both faster and more consistent than a conventional microprocessor relay on direct fiber.
On 24 September 2025, NamPower commissioned Sekelduin — a 132/66/33 kV indoor switching station near Swakopmund, Namibia, built by ACTOM as Africa's first fully digital substation with IEC 61850 process bus end-to-end.
IEC TC 57 has approved the New Work Item Proposal for IEC 61850-8-3 with ~95% of national committees voting in favour. The new standard will define a direct mapping of ACSI services onto WebSocket and JSON — a third SCSM alongside MMS and XMPP, designed to extend IEC 61850 beyond the substation.
The number of Ethernet switches with integrated IEC 61850-8-1 server increases. Manufacturers do not only implement standard logical node classes according to IEC 61850-7-4 but also those ones introduced by IEC 61850-90-4 technical report. These switches do also support buffered and unbuffered reporting mechanisms. Seems like the closest future is the one where IEC 61850-8-1 (MMS) communications will replace communications over SNMP (being widely used at the moment). This will allow for integration of Ethernet switches in process control systems the same way as it is done with IEC 61850-8-1 pr