Related Projects

Transmission Protection Guide with a high penetration of Inverter-Based Resources

Due to an increase in inverter-based resources (IBRs) from solar, wind and battery energy resources, there are protection challenges coming to the surface because of non-conventional short circuit characteristics of the IBRs. These protection issues have been adequately identified in the current industry publications from the likes of IEEE, CIGRE, etc., but there is a lack of general guidelines to mitigate the protection issues caused by IBRs. This deliverable aims to provide solutions for the
protection challenges posed by IBRs. Additionally, it aims to provide guidelines on developing functional specification for the future grid with a high penetration of IBRs. This work will be performed jointly with P173A – Planning Methods, Tool and Analytics.

Short Circuit Model Validation Tool (SHOVAL)

Accurate short circuit models are critical in performing protection & coordination studies. Currently, most utilities do not perform regular short circuit model validations as there is no automated tool available to do so and doing manual short circuit model validations are very cumbersome and time consuming. SHOVAL aims to automate the process of model validation with little manual work based on grid fault events and short circuit simulations. It will also identify the root-cause of discrepancies between simulated and measured values.

Roadmap to Adopt Centralized Protection Schemes (CPS)

Centralized protection schemes are gaining more traction due to advancements in communication and economic benefits of CPS. This research aims to study the changes that are required to configure and study centralized protection schemes when a utility is considering to adopt CPS, for example, settings for centralized protection, maintaining setting databases, procedures, studies, etc. This deliverable aims to provide a guide for a roadmap to migrate from micro-processor relays to CSP.

Synchronous Condenser Protection Guide

The usage of synchronous condenser to improve system stability has been on the rise worldwide due to a decrease in system inertia from a high penetration of inverter-based resources. There is a lack of guidance on synchronous condenser protection in the industry even though there is quite a bit of material available on synchronous generators. This deliverable aims to fill in this protection guidelines gap for synchronous condensers during the start-up and running conditions.

Protection Setting Relay Peer Review Tool

Peer review checks are typically performed by senior protection engineers before relay settings are issued for field implementation. Nowadays, many utility companies outsource their protection setting studies and relay setting developments to consultants and do not have enough in-house staff to perform peer reviews. PSPRT aims to fill in this gap by performing rigorous protection checks for distance and overcurrent relays as per the given protection setting criteria. This tool would assist in reducing protection mis-operations by ensuring the proposed protection settings would work for the given application. The Protection Settings Peer Review Tool performs comprehensive analysis of relay settings, coordination, and sensitivity under multiple different contingencies and grid scenarios; it
presents the high-level results in an interactive web-page single-line diagram while the detailed results can be viewed in Excel for easy filtering and trending.

Guide on performing dynamic stability study for NERC PRC-026 Compliance

NERC PRC-026 standard provides requirements to study the performance of protection relays during stable power swings. There are two approaches to perform a NERC PRC-026 study, one is based on static calculations and the second one is based on performing a dynamic stability study in a dynamic stability package. Most protection engineers would use the static calculation method even though it is less accurate as compared to performing a dynamic stability study approach. One of the reasons behind this is a lack of guidance in the industry on performing PRC-026 and dynamic stability studies in general for protection engineers. This deliverable aims to provides pros and cons of static calculations for PRC-026 , and provide guidelines targeted for protection engineers to perform dynamic stability studies for PRC-026 compliance