Digital Substation Engineering: Design, Automation, and Cybersecurity for the Modern Grid

The switchyard still obeys the same physics. Everything that carries information about it has changed.

Substation design, IEC 61850 automation, and operational-technology (OT) cybersecurity are traditionally taught in silos. The result? An engineer who can size a circuit breaker might never have traced a GOOSE message's transfer-time budget. A protection specialist fluent in distance-relay zones might miss how a Sampled Values timing error creates a false differential current. And project teams often discover—weeks before energization—that mandatory security architectures were never designed into the system.

Digital Substation Engineering closes this dangerous gap. Across eighteen rigorous chapters, this premium guide unites electrical design, automation, and cybersecurity into a single, connected discipline. Following US engineering practice and NERC CIP frameworks, every chapter delivers clear learning objectives, first-principle derivations, fully worked numerical examples with unit tracking, and practical problems.

Master the Modern Grid:

• Physical & Electrical Design: Tackle per-unit fault calculations, bus-arrangement trade-offs, and grounding-grid mesh-voltage checks.

• Advanced Protection Schemes: Apply symmetrical components to standard faults, master ANSI/IEEE device functions, and map traditional relaying directly onto IEC 61850 logical nodes.

• Digital Automation Architecture: Navigate process-bus latency, IEEE 1588 synchronization errors, and zero-loss redundancy networks.

• OT Cybersecurity & Compliance: Translate NERC CIP regulations into actionable engineering. Deploy electronic security perimeters, firewalls, and IEC 62351/62443 protocols without breaking critical protection timing budgets.

Also Covered in Depth: Merging units, SCADA gateways (DNP3/IEC 60870-5-104), the Purdue reference model, distributed energy resource (DER) interconnection (IEEE 1547), and end-to-end trip-time validation.

Whether you are a practicing protection engineer, an automation specialist, or a compliance officer needing the hard engineering behind the regulations, this book provides the complete picture.

Stop treating the digital substation as three separate subjects. Open Chapter 1 and build the connected understanding your projects demand.