Digital Substation is an engineering publication focused on IEC 61850 automation, protection systems, and digital grid intelligence.
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.
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.
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.