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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.
On 12 May 2026, Hitachi Energy and TEİAŞ announced the commissioning of Türkiye's first digital substation pilot. The scope is one feeder bay.
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.