Light-Weight IEC 61850 GOOSE Based Loss of Mains Protection for Smart Grid

Abstract

This paper presents a novel Loss of Mains (LoM) protection method based on IEC 61850 General Object Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) protocol. With the increased penetration of distributed generation (DG), the requirements for LoM or anti-islanding protection has become common in the electric utilities. The development of Smart Grids including extensive communication capabilities enables also communication based LoM approaches. Since IEC 61850 standard based systems are the mainstream in the substation communication, expanding this technology deeper in the distribution network provides interesting solution for communication based LoM protection. The standard IEC 61850-7-420 defines logical nodes (LNs) suitable for this purpose but there are not yet available devices applying this part of the standard. Therefore in this research, a light-weight 61850 GOOSE based LoM solution has been developed and demonstrated applying a microcontroller and available open source software. This paper introduces object modeling according to IEC 61850-7-420 defined LNs and an implementation applying GOOSE messages and microcontroller. The validity of the light-weight implementation is demonstrated with a simple laboratory setup that has been used for measuring the message latencies.