Analysis of protection blinding in active distribution grids

Abstract

Protection blinding is a challenging issue in renewables-penetrated distribution grids and refers to a situation where a circuit breaker may not trip due to fault current contribution from distributed generation. This research addresses how the distributed generation location and capacity impact the operation of the circuit breaker in terms of the response time of the circuit breakers. The relative electrical distances of the faults and distributed generation to the circuit breakers are considered. The impact of distributed generation capacity considering the fault location is characterized using a new index called the heterogeneity index. The electrical distance between distributed generations and circuit breakers and the electrical distance between fault and circuit breaker is considered by a second new index called the electrical distance ratio. Data analysis on simulation results shows that these indices capture the phenomena of protection blinding caused by distributed generation. Results show that a higher distributed generation penetration and faults that are electrically further away from a circuit breaker show severe cases of protection blinding captured by the indices. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how these indices can identify the worst impacted locations in the distribution grid. A key result is that protection blinding does not necessarily occur solely due to the presence of distributed generation between a circuit breaker and a fault, but is dependent on factors such as distributed generation location in the distribution grid, fault level, fault level distribution across the generation units and fault location.