Deploying IEC 61850 Process Bus and vPAC at the UK’s Largest GridHub (Dorman Point 400 kV Substation)

UK’s largest electricity transmission substation is designed to handle up to 3.2 GW of throughput ... the planned 400 kV facility ... will be build on IEC 61850 instead relying on 200 km multi-core copper control cabling ... wow.

Bruno Silveras LinkedIn post ...

Bruno Silveira reported today many details in his LinkedIn document (November 02, 2026):

Deploying IEC 61850 Process Bus and vPAC at the UK’s Largest GridHub (Dorman Point 400 kV Substation)

Excerpt:

"National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET) has secured 73.3 acres at Dorman Point within the Teesworks industrial zone in Redcar to develop what is projected to be the UK’s largest electricity transmission substation.Designed to handle up to 3.2 GW of throughput, the planned 400 kV facility will serve as the electrical backbone for hyperscale AI data centres, offshore wind landings, and industrial decarbonisation projects across Teesside.

Delivering transmission capacity of this scale under ambitious energisation targets (targeted for initial operations by late 2029) exposes the limits of legacy substation engineering. A traditional hardwired design across dozens of 400 kV feeder, transformer, and busbar bays would demand hundreds of kilometres of copper multi-core cabling, sprawling relay buildings, and months of point-to-point physical commissioning.

Applying a modern, software-defined architecture, combining an IEC61850 Station Bus, a redundant Process Bus, and Virtualised Protection, Automation, and Control (vPAC), fundamentally transforms the civil footprint, project timeline, and operational lifecycle of the Dorman Pointasset. ..."

Some 30 years after the start of the standardization project IEC 61850 we can see the change in applied technologies and standards for our electric power delivery systems ... more to come.