Abstract:
Due to pressure to increase economic efficiency and reduce environmental impact, today’s power systems are being stressed ever further towards the boundaries of stability and safe operation. New transmission lines and conventional generation are not being added to networks fast enough to maintain the traditional operating margins. To counteract these pressures, utilities are adding sophisticated new schemes and devices to their networks. One of the new schemes being investigated and implemented by utilities is wide area protection and control. These schemes take a wider view of the power network operation/state rather than relying solely on local measurement as is typically the case with conventional protective relay schemes. Wide area protection and control schemes are often given far reaching and
powerful influence on network operation. Protective actions may include line tripping, control of generation, load shedding, etc. It goes without saying that these actions, if used incorrectly, would have a devastating effect on the network. Therefore it is imperative that wide area protection and control schemes be thoroughly tested for security and reliability of operation. The paper describes a real time environment to test devices used within wide area protection and control schemes (e.g. PMU’s and protective relays) as well as the overall behaviour of the scheme under a wide variety of in situ operating conditions.
P. Forsyth, D. Ouellette, C. Peters, M. Desjardine, Presented at 2013 Cigre Canada Conference, Calgary, Alberta, September 9 - 11, 2013
KEYWORDS: PMU, IEC 61850, C37.118, wide area protection and control, DNP, IEC 60870-5-104,
SCADA, synchrophasor, real time simulator