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.
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.
The Brainstorm block is a collection of industry experts’ opinions on actual problems. It allows specialists to look at different problems from different perspectives.
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...