IEC61850 Based Substation Automation Systems Users Expectations and Stakeholders Interactions

IEC 61850 has gained growing importance since the publication of its first edition at the beginning of the last decade. The Substation Automation System (SAS) of several thousand substations in service is based on IEC 61850, and continues to grow. Its main objective is to allow interoperability between IEDs of different vendors in one SAS. This scope is at this moment being extended well beyond the limits of a substation with the publication of new parts of the standard for Hydroelectric Power Plants and Distributed Energy resources. With its promised benefits at the level of engineering efficiency (IEC 61850 is not only a simple protocol), IEC 61850 will be without any doubt THE standard applied in SAS worldwide, as well as in several other domains.