User Spotlight Series 2.0, Episode 1
Hybrid testing of power system protection communication over wireless 5G
Abstract: In the transition towards carbon-neutral smart grids, the role of ICT infrastructure is crucial, and exploiting wireless 5G may bring flexibility and significant cost savings in both installation and maintenance. Furthermore, power systems would gain access to 5G services including network slicing, massive IoT, and edge computing.
Testing of wireless communication for power systems applications demands a realistic hybrid pilot environment. In this presentation, we discuss how we upscaled our previous protection communication test setup to provide a novel pilot environment for testing wireless 5G technology on protection communication. Protection was chosen due to its most rigorous QoS requirements compared to other power system applications.
The pilot environment consisted of a closed-loop CHIL simulation on RTDS enhanced with access to a 5G test network and commercial networks. The devices under test were relays and merging units. The switches formed a natural coupling point, through which the data traffic was routed to the desired wireless network. Supplementary video and sensor data traffic were generated to load the connection and to test how different traffic profiles affect the critical communication.
Three diverse and latency-critical protection applications were tested in the pilot environment: virtual fault passage indicator, line differential, and intertrip protection.
Presenters:
Petra Raussi received her M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from LUT University, Lappeenranta, Finland in 2018. She is currently a Research Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and responsible for the Intelligent Energy testbed power system laboratory. Her research interests include power system communication and automation, 5G and beyond for critical data exchange, distributed control, and real-time systems. She is also currently a doctoral candidate at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, School of Electrical Engineering, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland. Her doctoral research focuses on providing new information on the impact of the ICT layer of smart grids on power systems.
Heli Kokkoniemi-Tarkkanen received her M.Sc. majoring in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland in 1995. Since 1992, she has been working at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in several positions, currently as a Senior Scientist. She has over 28 years of experience in commercial, military, and research projects covering various aspects of wireless communication from radio wave propagation modelling and network simulation to early-phase product development. In recent years, she has been focusing on QoS, latency, and reliability aspects by piloting and testing 5G services in new mission-critical vertical use cases such as protection and control of smart energy grids and harbor automation.
Investigating Inverter-Based Resources Impacts on the Transmission Line Protection via Hardware-in-the-loop Simulation
Abstract: Driven by policy changes, renewable energy is poised for an explosive growth in the recent decade. As one of the key forms of renewable energy, inverter-based resources (IBRs) accounts for a significant portion of the current and future renewable generation capacity. Controlled by fast micro-processors, the fault responses of these IBRs are largely dictated by the control algorithms and are fundamentally different from conventional synchronous generators.
Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation, commonly viewed as a robust tool for protection setting prototyping and testing, is used in this paper to investigate the impact of a wind farm, with type-4 full converter wind turbines, on the protection of a 345 kV transmission line in Texas, United States. The hosting transmission system as well as the wind farm are modeled in a real-time digital simulation (RTDS) system, and the physical line protection relays are interfaced with RTDS to perform a HIL simulation.
In this paper, two important topics are discussed in great details: (1) RTDS wind farm IBR model development and validation against vendor PSCAD model, and (2) IBR impacts on distance protection and current differential protection. In addition to the aforementioned technical challenges and assessments, the workflow and technical know-how presented in this paper also serves as a valuable application tutorial for any IBR related HIL testing with RTDS system.
Presenters:
Zheyuan Cheng, SENIOR ENGINEER, Protection & Control with Quanta Technology, received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2020 and his BS degree in electrical engineering from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2015. He has been working on renewable distributed energy resource control related research and industry projects since 2016. His areas of expertise include distributed energy resources protection and control.
Srinidhi Narayanan, ENGINEER III, Protection with Quanta Technology, graduated with a master’s degree in Electrical Power Systems Engineering from NC State University in 2021. The focus areas of her master’s degree included power system protection, transient analysis, and communication and SCADA systems. She has also completed a capstone project as a part of her graduate program, called “Design of Protection Scheme for an Inverter-Based Microgrid Circuit,” which was sponsored by Duke Energy. Srinidhi has more than 2 years of experience in the electrical power systems industry.
Juergen Holbach, EXECUTIVE ADVISOR, Protection and Control, Senior Director of Automation and Testing with Quanta Technology, has more than 25 years of experience designing and applying protective relaying. An IEEE member and chairman, he has published over a dozen papers and holds three patents. In 2009, Juergen received the Walter A. Elmore Best Paper Award from the Georgia Tech Relay Conference. Juergen’s areas of expertise include automation and protection, transmission protection, real-time digital simulator (RTDS) testing, and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61850 compliance.
Watch the recorded webinar here:
