Relay protection, SCADA, Metering, and Cybersecurity for electrical infrastructure.
IEC Technical Committee 57 and CIGRE Study Committee B5 have established a Category A liaison. The change formalises the route by which CIGRE work on PACS, process bus, virtualisation, and engineering practice reaches IEC 61850.
CIGRE's first dedicated framework for virtualised IEDs will not publish until Q1 2028 — but the vPAC pilots that have to align to it are being commissioned now. Its scope is already public, through the working group's Terms of Reference and a framework article refeatured in ELECTRA 345 (April 2026): what is mandatory, what is deliberately out of scope, and what every 2026 vPAC pilot should already be doing in response.
Most digital substation projects are single-vendor, single-site proofs of concept. RTE — the operator of France's 2,600-substation transmission grid — decided to do something harder: build a fully digital, multi-vendor PACS from scratch, act as its own system integrator, and scale it across the entire network.
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.
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.
Top-down IEC 61850 engineering — formalized in TR IEC 61850-90-30:2025 and TR IEC 61850-7-6 (Ed. 2) — moves specification errors from commissioning to the design phase, before a single IED is selected or procured. This article explains the mechanics of the five-step process: what each step produces, what files are exchanged, and why the sequence achieves outcomes the conventional bottom-up approach cannot.
IEC TC 57 Working Group 10 published seven Committee Draft for Vote documents proposing to split the monolithic IEC 61850-7-4 into seven modular parts. The logical node models themselves are not changing — only their structural organisation. Public commenting is open until April 10, 2026.
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.
In 2023, fourteen European TSOs signed a common statement on IEC 61850 engineering and demonstrated a working proof of concept. Their five-step top-down process — backed by two new IEC technical reports — changes how utilities, IED suppliers, and tool vendors interact. Here is what they built and why it matters.
XML Schema validation checks structure — it cannot verify that a GOOSE subscription references a valid dataset or that a logical node contains required data objects. Object Constraint Language (OCL) fills that gap. IEC TS 61850-6-3, published in 2025, defines how OCL rules should be written and applied to IEC 61850 XML files, laying the groundwork for consistent, formal SCL validation across tools.