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.
Work on harmonizing the Common Information Model (CIM) and IEC 61850 is increasingly focused on formal rules that software tools can process directly. For digital substations, this opens the way to automatic transformation of engineering data and automatic consistency checking between models at different levels.
A new and important mechanism for validating SCL files is emerging in the IEC 61850 engineering process: OCL (Object Constraint Language), a language for formally describing constraints and rules for the objects of an information model.
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.
In digital-substation projects most attention goes to GOOSE, SV, PTP and the network. But there is another important layer — MMS exchange and IEC 61850 reports, through which SCADA, HMI, gateways and monitoring systems receive telemetry from IEDs. In practice the problems here are deceptively simple: the MMS connection is up, the device is reachable, the client «sees» the server — yet data does not update, some signals disappear, events are duplicated, or the report control block does not activate at all. This article covers the sharpest problems with report control blocks (RptEna, ConfRev, a block already taken by another client, TrgOps, a DataSet mismatch, duplication from the buffer via entryID and too much faith in the SCL file) and a practical principle: cross-check the SCL file, the device's actual MMS model and a PCAP capture together.
On 12 May 2026, Hitachi Energy and TEİAŞ announced the commissioning of Türkiye's first digital substation pilot. The scope is one feeder bay.
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.
A contractor hands over an SCD file claiming it matches the actual device configuration. But how do you verify that quickly and provably when there are 76 IEDs on site and no permanent monitoring system? A field case from Tekvel: the verification module in the Tekvel Magic software automatically compared the device configurations against the SCD and produced an engineering deviation report covering DataSets, GOOSE, Sampled Values and MMS reports in 15 minutes.
CIGRE's first dedicated framework for virtualised IEDs will not publish until Q1 2028 — but the vPAC pilots that have to align to it are being commissioned now. Its scope is already public, through the working group's Terms of Reference and a framework article refeatured in ELECTRA 345 (April 2026): what is mandatory, what is deliberately out of scope, and what every 2026 vPAC pilot should already be doing in response.
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.
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.
How to use the dumpcap command-line utility for stable long-term network traffic capture — without Wireshark freezes or crashes.
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.