by Claude – an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, USA The protection of electrical power systems has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past century, evolving from simple...
Issue 073 September 2025
Cover Art
Cover Story
Featured Articles
„Signal Testing On-the-go” Entire Substation in your PC
By Onur Durak, OMICRON electronics, Germany Imagine you are a Substation Automation Engineer in the early 2010s. You are on the road to commission a project, and you receive an email at the airport...
Practical Application of AI-LLMs for Calculating Relay Settings
by Sean McGuinness, EPRI Europe DAC, Dublin, Ireland Large language models (LLMs) have received a lot of public and industry attention since the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022. Their...
Virtualized Protection & Control: Protection as Software
by Saurabh Talwar, Siemens, Germany We have witnessed profound digital transformations across numerous industries—from social media and robotics to smart manufacturing and autonomous transportation...
Let’s dream together but sooner or later, it will become our...
By Jean Raymond, Hydro-Quebec, Canada Context (The Whats and Whys) Modern power grids are evolving into highly integrated networks of electricity generation, transmission, and distribution facilities...
Editorial
Editorial – Issue 073 September
Watching and driving the evolution by Alex Apostolov, Editor-in-Chief I started my career as a protection and control engineer exactly half a century ago and as a result I can claim that I’ve...
Last Word
Last Word – Issue 073 September 2025
The evolution never stops by Alex Apostolov, USA Over the past century, protection, automation, and control (PAC) systems have evolved from electromechanical devices to software-defined, data-centric...
The Guru
Interview with PACWorld guru Christoph Brunner
PAC World: When and where were you born? C.B.: I was born in 1958 at the Children’s Hospital in Basel, in the canton of Basel-Stadt in Switzerland. At that time, however, my family lived...
History
The history of ground fault detection – at the beginning pd the...
by Walter Schossig, Germany, and Thomas Schossig, OMICRON electronics GmbH, Austria Ground fault protection for networks with ungrounded or high impedance-grounded star points did not yet exist. More...
News
Spain/Portugal blackout
On 28 April 2025 at 12:33 CEST, Spain and Portugal suffered a system-wide blackout; a small border area in France was briefly affected. The rest of Continental Europe did not experience significant...
CIGRE Distinguished member awards 2025
Alexander Voloshin has been granted the Distinguished Member award 2024 for B5 “Protection and Automation.” Every two years longstanding services to CIGRE are rewarded upon proposal from their...
Flexible time synchronization system
Meinberg’s new LANTIME M3000 is a field-upgradeable and extremely flexible system that covers time synchronization needs – today and in the future. The M3000 chassis has four power supply...
Efficient Vulnerability Management
OMICRON’s StationGuard GridOps vulnerability management accurately identifies only those vulnerabilities that are relevant to the existing OT assets. This greatly simplifies risk analysis and...
Substation hardened server
Dell PowerEdge XR-12 servers are used for Virtual Protection Automation and Control (vPAC), particularly in substation environments due to their certification for IEC 61850-3 compliance and their...
IEEE PES Lifetime Achievement Award
Dr. Anjan Bose is the recipient of the 2025 IEEE PES Lifetime Achievement Award for sustained pioneering contributions to automation and control of power grid operations, training, and education...
Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award
Dr. Mladen Kezunovic is the recipient of the 2025 IEEE PES Peter W. Sauer Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award for innovations in protective relaying education as Graduate Power Engineering...
IEEE PES Meritorious Service Award
Meliha Selak is the recipient of the 2025 IEEE PES Patrick P. Ryan Meritorious Service Award for contributions and leadership in global technical and educational activities and membership growth of...
Launch of the Process Bus Experience Pack
During the PAC World 2025 Conference in Glasgow, Grid to Great launched their new Process Bus Experience Pack. The idea is to help substation engineers ready to dive into process bus. But most setups...
Power outages, September 2025
By Rannveig Loken, Norway 29 May 2025, Texas, US: Severe weather swept through Central Texas bringing intense winds, large hail and flooding, 72,500 homes lost power at the height of the storm...
Industry Updates
IEEE PES PSCC Update
by Eric Thibodeau, Hydro Quebec, Quebec, Canada This column begins with a brief thought experiment: Picture yourself as a Professional Engineer working at a utility company who also serves as the...
IEC 61850 – a long history
by Christoph Brunner, it4power, Switzerland This is the last IEC 61850 column I write as a convenor of WG10. I hope you enjoyed the topics I selected over the last 18 years since PAC World magazine...
IEC TC 57 WG 17 Update
IEC 61850 for monitoring data center electrical and other systems by Tom Berry, Schneider-Electric IEC TC 57 WG 17 is in charge of power system intelligent electronic device communication and...
IEEE PES PSRC Update
IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Power System Relaying and Control (PSRC) Committee PES Power System Relaying and Control (PSRC) Committee is responsible for the development of standards, guides...
CIGRE Study Committee B5
by Peter Bishop, Transpower NZ Ltd, New Zealand News from CIGRE Study Committee B5 Protection and Automation SC B5 (particularly with the work of the local Japan National Committee organizing team)...
