Relay protection, SCADA, Metering, and Cybersecurity for electrical infrastructure.
A new version of Skunkworks Network Analyzer — a specialised Wireshark build with extensions for analysing IEC 61850 traffic — has been released on the OTB Consulting Services website. The update fixes the SclExtractor, adjusts the semantic data displays and removes outdated IEC 61850-90-5 terminology. Useful for engineers who diagnose GOOSE, Sampled Values and MMS on digital substations.
On 12 May 2026, Hitachi Energy and TEİAŞ announced the commissioning of Türkiye's first digital substation pilot. The scope is one feeder bay.
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.
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.
The CDV vote on seven new IEC 61850-7-xxx documents has closed at IEC (Core, Common part, Primary equipment, Instrument transformers, Substation automation, Protection, Power quality metering). The monolithic IEC 61850-7-4 is being split into thematic parts — they can be updated independently. Common Data Classes still remain in IEC 61850-7-3.
Someone has put the world's power infrastructure on a single interactive map: 120,000+ power plants, 2.7 million HV/MV lines, 800,000+ substations — plus data centres, gas pipelines, submarine communications cables and flood-risk zones. Sources: OSM, ENTSO-E, Global Energy Monitor, EIA, HIFLD, TeleGeography and others.
ICSForge has been released under the GPLv3 license — an open-source tool for validating the coverage of ICS cybersecurity tools. It supports 10 industrial protocols (including Modbus/TCP, IEC-104, S7comm, OPC UA, IEC 61850 GOOSE), 536 scenarios and 11 ready-made attack chains, all mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK for ICS matrix (coverage 68 of 83 techniques, 82 %).
UCA International Users Group has opened registration for 61850 IOP 2026, the annual interoperability testing event for IEC 61850 equipment and software tools. For the first time, the programme includes multi-vendor MPLS network testing and functional verification based on Basic Application Profiles (BAP) per IEC 61850-7-6 Ed.2 and IEC 61850-90-30:2025.
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.
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.
ENTSO-E's 472-page final report on the April 28, 2025 blackout in Spain and Portugal identifies systemic failures in voltage control, protection settings, and distributed generation visibility — not a single technology — as the root causes of the largest European grid incident in over two decades.
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.