IEC 61850 is more than just a “Future Trend”

A manager from a big Asian power utility wrote me the other day:

“Dear Karlheinz,
… because of the schedule of my visit to the CIGRE2014 session at Paris, also an overseas trip for our protection experts to XXXX at Nanjing and YYYY at Tokyo in late September 2014. For one thing that I could learn from both trips, IEC 61850 should no longer be called a "future trend" for the power industry, as it is already the adapted practice everywhere! Just you know it is always not easy to implement new standards in the utilities, especially talking about some well-established ones ...”.

The standard series IEC 61850 is now available for some 10 years. Many manufacturers of automation systems have implemented a reasonable subset of the standards. It’s in use all over. Don’t worry if your management has still to be convinced to implement or use the standards. It takes some time to get there.

It may happen that in some cases you may have to wait for one or two retirements …it’ll come.

Note: Haste produces waste. Take your time – in the meantime get yourself and your people trained to understand what it is all about.