The electrical equipment of intelligent substation cannot deal with the problem of load mutation, and the load adjustment is not timely, which leads to the poor performance of thermal fault identification of electrical equipment. Therefore, a study on thermal fault identification of the electrical equipment of intelligent substation based on infrared technology is proposed. First, under the background of infrared technology, according to the thermal fault feature extraction model of substation electrical equipment, the principle of double station cross location is proposed; combined with the sampling results of thermal fault characteristic parameters of electrical equipment in intelligent substation, the thermal fault characteristics are analyzed; through the process of thermal fault identification of electrical equipment in intelligent substation, the preliminary classification structure of thermal fault is obtained and the thermal fault identification is completed. The experimental results show that the designed method has good performance of thermal fault identification, high output stability, better identification effect after optimization, and highly sensitive identification ability.