The future grid is a seamless, cost-effective electricity system, from generation to end-use. This concept will enable electrical power systems to make clean energy viable, provide universal consumer access, incorporate new technologies and equipment, and increase reliability and safety. These characteristics pose new challenges to the power industry since they move power systems away from high inertia traditional fossil-fuelled generation towards distributed and intermittent renewable sources, demanding new specifications and design requirements.

A challenge that protection and automation engineers must face is that the development, specification, and implementation of solutions for accommodating DC networks are constantly expanding to cope with the increasing use of power-electronics-based devices. New technologies, such as six-phase systems, distributed generation and energy storage, and practices, such as dynamic line rating are being incorporated into three-phase systems. Solutions to these challenges must combine hardware and software technologies in ubiquitous and transparent communication networks, have high processing capacities to handle massive data, and allow scalability, ensuring functional integration at all levels.

The aim of this Special Issue is to present innovative original research and review articles that address the challenges that the development, specification, design, and operation of protection and automation systems must face in this unfolding scenario. We hope that the authors will share new practices and solutions, methodologies, and acquired experiences to produce a comprehensive set of relevant information, to allow further discussion on the topic, structuring solutions to the problems that protection and automation engineers will face.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Distribution networks considering closed-loop networks and the presence of distributed energy resources
• HVDC transmission lines, links, and networks
• Protection of six-phase systems
• Impact of FACTS and Power Electronic Conversion on Protection
• Impact of Wind turbines on protections
• Impact of Fault Current Limiters
• Impact of superconducting lines
• New protection functions and algorithms
• New substation architectures in the IEC61850 scope
• Centralized protection and control
• Application of Synchrophasors
• Adaptive Protection and Control
• Application of System Integrity Protection Schemes
• Protection and automation of supergrids
• Establishment of interfaces for EMTP programs that include commercial IED models