Relay protection, SCADA, Metering, and Cybersecurity for electrical infrastructure.
Conventional CTs hardwired to two multifunction IEDs per 132 kV bay from different manufacturers, GOOSE in place of interlock wiring, a virtualized SCMS, and a standard drawing set that ships with every tender. The design has now supported the construction of 90 substations in Dubai.
Siemens Smart Infrastructure has unveiled SIPROTEC V — a virtualized version of SIPROTEC 5: up to 60 virtual IEDs on a single substation-grade server, Linux with a real-time kernel, the familiar DIGSI 5 and IEC 61850 System Configurator. Functions are organised by bays, with GOOSE, MMS, Sampled Values, PTP, PRP/HSR and NERC CIP / BDEW cybersecurity. The architectural signal: protection is going software-defined.
What IEC 61869-9 actually requires, and where the boundary lies between "still synchronized" and "no longer synchronized". The article unpacks the "2 → 1 → 0" misconception about SAMU/NCIT behavior on PTP loss, the link between clockClass, timeTraceable and SmpSynch, and how a complex protection function should react when one of its source streams loses synchronization.
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.
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.
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.
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The SystemCorp "IEC 61850-9-2 LE Sampled Value Publisher" is a hardware platform for specific sampled value publisher applications for the Smart Grid IoT Platform from Novtech using the Altera (now part of Intel) dual core ARM/FPGA Cyclone V SoC.
Protection and control intellectual electronic devices (IEDs) respond to the signals of currents and voltages measured at certain points of the power system, and assess the state of the protected power system component.
Abstract for the patent Merging unit and method of operating a merging unit states the following: A merging unit including at least one input interface for receiving input data characterizing at least one voltage and/or current related to a component of a...