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We appreciate your articles, news, feedback or any information that will help us paint a broader picture of the IEC 61850 role in the present and the future of our industry.

Two years after the first issue of PAC World looked at the new substation communications standard IEC 61850 and its impact on the protection, automation and control industry, in this issue we focused on the worldwide implementation and what we have learned during that time. The articles in the magazine express the opinions of their authors and we hope that they will trigger some discussions of the issues and will get our readers to comment or send us their own articles describing their experience or concepts for the implementation of IEC 61850 in the future. It is clear that the industry has made significant progress, resulting in IEC 61850 being recognized as one of the key standards to be used in the foundation of the future Smart Grid.

In countries in different corners of the world it is becoming the standard communications protocol in substations.

Several important facts demonstrate the growing confidence of the industry in the ability of the concepts implemented in IEC 61850 to model any domain in the electric power field:

• GOOSE messages are already being used outside the substation for critical applications such as System Integrity Protection Schemes (SIPS)
• Extensions of the models to cover wind power, hydro power and distributed energy resources (DER)
• Report on substation-to-substation communications
• New work item proposal for condition monitoring models
• New work item proposal for communication of synchrophasor data

The above applications and IEC activities are complimented with the work of several CIGRE and IEEE working groups dealing with the application issues and testing requirements for IEC 61850 based devices and systems.

At the same time, any conference in the field of electric power systems protection, automation and control has either a dedicated session, or multiple papers presented at other sessions focusing on the standard and its applications.

The team of PAC World and its correspondents from around the world will keep you informed of any further developments.