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"Shall support IEC 61850" is too general a wording. We look at where to check IEC 61850 conformance certificates today, what a conformance certificate really confirms, how a registry of 1,650 test records is structured by editions and roles, the seven parameters to check in a certificate, and how conformance testing differs from interoperability testing — and how to phrase a requirement in a specification instead of a vague phrase about "standard support".
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.
UK Power Networks' Constellation project replaces bay-level protection relays with virtualized software on substation computers, using IEC 61850 process bus for local protection and R-GOOSE over 5G for wide area coordination. The first site is operating in Maidstone, Kent, with five more planned across South East England.
Interoperability testing of substation configuration tools (SCT and ICT) has evolved from a supplementary element of the first IOP in 2011 to the central axis of the entire test programme by 2024. At IOP 2019, only 10 out of 159 ICD files (6.28%) passed validation without errors.
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.
IEC TC57 WG17 has held its kick-off meeting to develop a new document describing how IEC 61850 can be used for monitoring and control of electrical and engineering systems in data centres.
How to use the dumpcap command-line utility for stable long-term network traffic capture — without Wireshark freezes or crashes.
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.
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.