Evaluation of protective relaying reliability in renewable energy environment

Abstract

The decrement in supply of fossil fuel led to the exploration of new energy sources, which varies from wind energy to solar energy, which are known as Renewable Energy. The main problem with these power sources are the inconsistency of their energy that depends very much on the environmental factors. The embedment of these power sources onto conventional power transmission network would affect the sensitivity and reliability of protective relaying. Two different types of solar power plant connection to power system network are presented in this paper, namely Bus Connection and T-Off Connection. Computer Aided Protection Engineering (CAPE) software is used to model the networks being protected by distance protection, and simulate short circuit scenario. This paper specifically focuses on evaluating the impact of the in-feed current being contributed by both network configurations to the reliability of distance protection. © 2017 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.