Power Systems Protection Coordination and Associated Reliability with Smart Grid Security

In this paper, new Hierarchically Coordinated Protection (HCP) concept that mitigates and manages the effects of increased grid complexity on the protection of the power system is proposed. The concept is based on predicting protection circumstances in real-time, adapting protection actions to the power system's prevailing conditions, and executing corrective actions when an undesirable outcome of protection operation is verified. Depending on an application, HCP concept may utilize local and wide area measurements of the power system parameters, as well as non-power system data, such as meteorological, detection of lightning strikes, outage data and geographic information. Since HCP introduces intelligence, flexibility and self-correction in protection operation, it is well suited for the systems with increased penetration of renewables where legacy solutions may be prone to mis-operate. Such instances are unintended distance relay tripping for overloaded lines, insensitive anti-islanding scheme operation, and inability to mitigate cascading events, among other system conditions caused by renewable generation prevailing in future grids.