CIGRE 2026: protection devices go virtual
A report from the exhibition floor of CIGRE 2026 in Paris. The main theme for us was the virtualisation of protection — and it is no longer a single experimental product. Some offer virtualised protection functions, others the substation servers to run them on, others assemble multi-vendor vPAC architectures on the open platforms. The key question has shifted: no longer «can protection run in a virtual machine», but who defines the hardware architecture and answers for the reliability of the computing platform.