The Digitalized Substation: Why Protection and SCADA Engineers Now Need Software Skills

A substation used to be defined by copper: relays, wiring looms, and physical terminal blocks. That is changing, and the change has a name, a standard, and direct consequences for what a protection or SCADA engineer needs to know.

The standard driving the shift

The digitalisation of substations centres on IEC 61850, the international standard, published by the International Electrotechnical Commission, titled "Communication networks and systems for power utility automation." IEC 61850 defines the communication architecture between intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) inside a substation: protection relays, meters, and control units from different manufacturers exchanging data over a standardised digital network rather than dedicated point-to-point copper wiring. The standard is published in multiple parts; one part (IEC 61850-6) specifies "a file format for describing communication-related IED configurations and IED parameters, communication system configurations, switch yard (function) structures, and the relations between them", commonly known in the industry by its abbreviation, SCL (Substation Configuration Language).

Practically, this means a "digital substation" replaces much of the copper-wired signalling between protection devices with fibre-optic links carrying standardised digital messages. The engineering task shifts from "does this wire go to the right terminal" to "is this device correctly configured on the network, and is the data model right."

Why this raises the bar on grid workforce skills

This shift is not happening in isolation. It's part of the wider grid-digitalisation push the IEA describes in its Electricity Grids and Secure Energy Transitions report, which calls for "digitalising and modernising distribution grids" as part of the roughly USD 600 billion in annual grid investment needed by 2030. The same report's headline workforce recommendation, to "ensure digital skills are integrated into power industry curricula," is written with exactly this kind of transition in mind: protection and automation engineering increasingly requires network and data-modelling literacy on top of the traditional relay-coordination and fault-analysis skills the job has always demanded.

A separate IEA analysis of energy-sector job postings backs this up directly at the subsector level: postings in smart-grid roles show the highest share, of any energy subsector tracked, of jobs requiring at least one specialised digital skill, and data analysis is the single most requested digital skill across the postings studied. A protection or SCADA engineer competing for those roles is, in effect, competing on a software-adjacent skill set as much as a power-systems one.

What doesn't change

None of this replaces the underlying power-systems knowledge a protection engineer needs: fault analysis, relay coordination, and grid-stability fundamentals are still the foundation the digital layer sits on top of. What has changed is that "I can configure and troubleshoot a modern substation" now implicitly includes "I can read and work with an IEC 61850 data model and the network it runs on," in the same way it once implicitly included "I can read a wiring diagram."

Key sources

• IEC, "Communication networks and systems for power utility automation" (IEC 61850): the standard defining the digital substation architecture this article describes.
• IEC 61850-1, introductory overview: the plain-language starting point for the standard's scope.
• IEA, "Electricity Grids and Secure Energy Transitions" executive summary: the grid-digitalisation investment case and workforce recommendation.
• IEA, "Mapping green and digital energy jobs" executive summary: the smart-grid job-posting data behind the digital-skills claim.