-The smart substation is the heart of a transmission system, which is particularly emphasized as the most significant composition of smart grids in China. In order to assess the functionality performance of substation technologies, this paper presents methods used to identify the most promising solutions for smart substation design and to evaluate the technical levels of available technologies. The multi-index optimization model is presented to address the issue of smart substation planning. A mathematical model of the planning decision problem is established with multiple objectives consisting of economic, reliability, and green key indices, and many kinds of concerns including physical and environmentally friendly operations are formulated as a set of constraints. With respect to the assessment of the technical level regarding integration of advanced technologies into a substation, a modified grey whitenization weight function is adopted to structure a novel grey clustering method. The proposed grey clustering approach is used to overcome the difficulty of insufficient quantitative assessment capacity for traditional methods. The evaluation of technical effects provides the classification definition for the development phase and the maturity level of the smart substation. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches in planning decision-making and evaluation of construction efforts is demonstrated with case studies involving the actual smart substation projects of Wenchongkou substation in China Southern Power Grid (CSG) and Mengzi substation in State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC).