Abstract
Protection blinding is a challenging issue in renewables-penetrated distribution grids and refers to a situation where a circuit breaker may not trip due to fault current contribution from distributed generation. This research addresses how the distributed generation location and capacity impact the operation of the circuit breaker in terms of the response time of the circuit breakers. The relative electrical distances of the faults and distributed generation to the circuit breakers are considered. The impact of distributed generation capacity considering the fault location is characterized using a new index called the heterogeneity index. The electrical distance between distributed generations and circuit breakers and the electrical distance between fault and circuit breaker is considered by a second new index called the electrical distance ratio. Data analysis on simulation results shows that these indices capture the phenomena of protection blinding caused by distributed generation. Results show that a higher distributed generation penetration and faults that are electrically further away from a circuit breaker show severe cases of protection blinding captured by the indices. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how these indices can identify the worst impacted locations in the distribution grid. A key result is that protection blinding does not necessarily occur solely due to the presence of distributed generation between a circuit breaker and a fault, but is dependent on factors such as distributed generation location in the distribution grid, fault level, fault level distribution across the generation units and fault location.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1783-1797 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | IET Renewable Power Generation |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 11 |
| Early online date | 30 Jun 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 17 Aug 2024 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Funder
This work was supported by the German Research Foundation DFG as part of the project “Multi-ResiServD” with the project identification number 360352892 of the priority pro-gram DFG SPP 1984 - Hybrid and multimodal energy systems: System theory methods for the transformation and operation of complex networks. The work of A. Ghasemi was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Ref. 3.4 - IRN- 1214645 -GF-E) for his research fellowship at the University of Passau in Germany. We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of University Library Passau.Funding
This work was supported by the German Research Foundation DFG as part of the project “Multi-ResiServD” with the project identification number 360352892 of the priority pro-gram DFG SPP 1984 - Hybrid and multimodal energy systems: System theory methods for the transformation and operation of complex networks. The work of A. Ghasemi was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Ref. 3.4 - IRN-1214645-GF-E) for his research fellowship at the University of Passau in Germany. We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of University Library Passau.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft | 360352892 |
| Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung | 3.4 - IRN-1214645-GF-E |
Keywords
- distributed power generation
- power system protection
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
