Digital Substation is an engineering publication focused on IEC 61850 automation, protection systems, and digital grid intelligence.
IEC 61850 interoperability testing is under way in Utrecht, where equipment and software from multiple suppliers are being integrated into common protection, automation and control applications. Participant reports now cover functional protection tests, network configuration from SCD files and virtualised protection.
The developers of the libIEC61850 library have released a fix for a bug that could cause valid GOOSE messages to be discarded by the receiving application. The problem affected version 1.6.2 and was caused by an incorrect Ethernet frame length check. The messages could be transmitted over the network successfully and appear in Wireshark, yet never reach the GOOSE subscriber's handler. This matters above all for developers of products supporting the IEC 61850 standard that use libIEC61850.
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.
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.
A practical reference for capture filters in Wireshark when working with IEC 61850 traffic. Why a display filter is not enough on a digital substation (especially of the process-bus generation), how a capture filter differs from a display filter, how the BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) syntax is structured, and ready-to-use filter recipes for GOOSE and SV — from selecting by EtherType and OUI to APPID and multicast addresses.
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.
8 out of 10 configurators fail to fully recognize SCD files. We analyze the confRev attribute in GOOSE and SV: what happens when the value does not match the expected one, and how this nearly derailed the commissioning of a real project with 43 IEDs.
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.
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.
In 2023, fourteen European TSOs signed a common statement on IEC 61850 engineering and demonstrated a working proof of concept. Their five-step top-down process — backed by two new IEC technical reports — changes how utilities, IED suppliers, and tool vendors interact. Here is what they built and why it matters.
South Africa's Eskom is building a self-healing grid through AI, FLISR, smart metering and microgrids — backed by a R321 billion five-year capex plan. Here's what is actually deployed, what is still being developed, and what the engineering numbers say.