We report on recent developments in hybrid optical protection schemes that make use of passive fiber Bragg grating-based transducers for the distributed measurement of voltage and current. In addition to the details of the hybrid optical sensor technology, and its full integration with a commercial busbar protection relay, we report on the first-time laboratory demonstration of a centralized three-ended unit protection scheme featuring hybrid optical sensors capable of passive and wide-area coverage. Furthermore, we discuss the impact of this technology on present and future protection applications that may be improved or enabled by the proposed scheme.