The 8th annual IEC 61850 Week 2021 was scheduled to take place in Gothenburg, Sweden, but because of the continuing Covid-19 pandemic it was switched to a virtual conference, exhibition and networking forum that took place 18-22 October 2021 via the Swapcard virtual event platform.
With a strong focus on ‘rapid replacement’ this year’s program guided utilities on how best to leverage the latest innovations in systems and components to meet new regulatory pressures whilst meeting their industrial scale deployment goals.
The week began with an in-depth workshop on System Specification, led by Christoph Brunner with contributions from Thomas Sterckx and Joerg Reuter.
The main 3-day conference focused on the latest implementations of the standard in a variety of domains, most notably within legacy and new substations, inter-substation, from substation to control center, and across DER infrastructure.
The week wrapped up with a day focused on the Cybersecurity considerations for IEC 61850. Despite the virtual format the interactivity levels were high, with frequent Q&A sessions, scheduled speaker hang-out sessions, and multiple roundtable discussion sessions built into the 5-day program.
Participants were encouraged to connect and conduct 1:1 video meetings live on the platform, making this one of the most interactive virtual events that’s taken place this year.
