How to analyze digital substation traffic efficiently?
A practical guide to three Wireshark features that dramatically speed up digital substation traffic analysis — display filters, frame marking, and custom IED names.
Relay protection, SCADA, Metering, and Cybersecurity for electrical infrastructure.
A practical guide to three Wireshark features that dramatically speed up digital substation traffic analysis — display filters, frame marking, and custom IED names.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SGTech Europe 2019, the Smart Grid Innovation Project Exchange, takes place 26–28 March 2019 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Rosseti, the Russian distribution grid operator, and ABB agreed to cooperate in order to carry out next generation digital grid projects in Russia, including those with advanced digital technologies of grid operating process automation.
Future Intelligent Transmission Network SubStation (FITNESS) is the pilot live multi-vendor digital substation demonstration in GB. The project was successfully awarded under RIIO NIC, Ofgem, in late 2015 and detailed design work began in 2016.
IEC TC 57 has published (57/1767/NP) a proposal for extending the System Configuration Language (SCL) to provide high-level direction in terms of how best to bind the HMI graphical objects with the IEC 61850 data objects/attributes using the configuration description language defined in IEC 61850-6. The concept willl be based upon the existing System Configuration Language (SCL) defined in IEC 61850-6, in addition to possibly incorporating other non-IEC namespaces such as the W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) namespace.
Can DANEO 400 from Omicron electronics be effectively used at commissioning and maintenance stages as the only IEC 61850 instrument?
A local area network is critical infrastructure in a digital substation. Experts in the area of relay protection and automatic as well as automated process control systems run into it with increasing frequency, while the number of questions such as, ‘How to design it?’, ‘How to maintain it?’, ‘How to evaluate its security and effectiveness?’ only increases.
Using which IEC 61850 services fault recorders in digital substations must acquire data? How the architecture of fault recording systems must change in digital substation? Experts talk.
Much-talked-of Heartbleed bug of open-source OpenSSL cryptography library has been found in ABB Relion 650 series IEDs. Care about this if your IED firmware revision is 1.3.0. Word has been spread by ICS-CERT (Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team).