Verification of protection blinding in a real-world simulation model
Authors
Advisors
Issue Date
Type
Keywords
Citation
Abstract
The addition of renewable energy into the distribution comes with a large number of environmental benefits but does give rise to some risks associated with the protection system. Issues such as protection blinding, reverse flow, and sympathetic tripping are the most common that have been researched for the time over current relays. The coordination of these relays is at risk and verification of the relay settings on real world systems needs to be studied. This paper will build an urban Midwest utility Feeder distribution model in OpenDSS with the help of a local utility company and referencing one of their urban distribution models and verify if the standard protective relay settings are at risk of misoperating at the substation level. The study will be conducted on 3 different sized distributed energy resources (DER) and on two different locations on the same feeder, close to the substation and further away from the substation. Three different testing scenarios are conducted: normal flow with no faults on the system, faults only on the feeder that has the DER connected to it, and faults on neighboring feeders. Adjusting the DER size and location along with different fault types will allow to find the worst combination for protection blinding on the simulated model. The results show that the urban system in study is not at risk of protection blinding but is susceptible to sympathetic when the DER is large enough to back feed into the system. However, the placement of DER on the main feeder branch will avoid sympathetic tripping as the Switchgear feeder is the first protective device and is set high enough to avoid a misoperation. Placement of the DER on the Feeder branches does pose a threat and will cause a misoperation.