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.
Siemens announced SIPROTEC V at DISTRIBUTECH 2026 — a software-defined protection and control system consolidating up to 60 hardware IEDs on a single server. We look at what changes for substation engineers, and what Siemens has not yet disclosed.
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.
CIGRE Study Committee B5 has opened Working Group B5.90, tasked with writing the first dedicated guidelines for commissioning and testing of fully digital protection and automation control systems. The Terms of Reference, published in January 2026, cover FAT, SAT, and operational testing for IEC 61850 process bus architectures.
The UCA IUG conformance registry documents 1,650 test records across three IEC 61850 editions. To read the numbers, you need to know the policy behind them: who sets the transition deadlines, when Edition 2-only testing ended, and why 2023 produced a record spike. This article traces the process.
There are several applications that can be used for monitoring IEC 61850 traffic in the Ethernet network. But there is one free-of-charge option everyone should know about.
When configuring GOOSE and Sampled Values communications it is useful (and sometimes is a must) to have the possibility to check VLAN and Priority tags. Whether your network adapter driver strips tagging or not will define the availability of these parameters not only while using Wireshark, but also other specific tools for analysis of GOOSE and Sampled Values traffic (Omicron SVScout, Omicron IEDScout, GOOSE Inspector, etc.). Today we will see how to make Intel network adapters not to strip this important info.
TEKVEL company presented a free beta version of JAVA-based IEC 61850-9-2LE software simulator. Digital Substation immediately downloaded the application and offers an express overview of the proposed software.