Advanced Decentralized Protection, Control and Monitoring Strategies for Distribution Automation

Abstract

Quality of service (QoS) has been improving over the years due to the increment of remotely controlled equipment in the electrical grid but recently, it is reaching a turn-point where its continued increment is no longer contributing to a perceptible improvement. Besides, dispatch centers are being challenged with an even more complex reality that is the manual coordination and operation of all these devices. The remote control and monitoring capabilities, by themselves, do not provide automation that can relieve dispatch operators from a sluggish manual reconfiguration, that often relies on trial and error to locate a fault. These are the challenges that created the need of an intelligent grid that can heal by itself without the need of manual operations. Aiming to learn, to develop and to test new algorithms in a controlled and limited environment, EDP Distribuição decided to materialize the Self-Healing (SH) project in the overhead network in a partnership with EFACEC PAC Division, in the region of Loures, Portugal.The aim of this paper is to develop new algorithms and solutions that will be adapted to EDP Distribuição environment to implement high-speed power system protection coordination schemes with advanced SH strategies based on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communications. In sum, this project targets a faster fault clearance, a reduction of the Non-Distributed Energy (NDE) and System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) and a decrement of frequency and duration of voltage sags.