Bayesian Detection of Islanding Events Using Voltage Angle Measurements

The growing presence of distributed generation in power systems increases the risk for the unintentional creation of electrical islands. It is important to apply reliable and quick is-landing protection methods. At the same time, the deployment of phasor measurement units facilitates the usage of data-oriented techniques for the development of new wide-area protection applications, one of which is islanding protection. This paper presents a Bayesian approach to detecting an islanding event, which utilizes measurements of voltage angles at the system’s buses. A model of mixtures of probabilistic principal component analysers has been fitted to the data using a variational inference algorithm and subsequently used for islanding detection. The proposed approach removes the need for setting parameters of the probabilistic model. The performance of the method is demonstrated on synthetic power system measurements.