Adaptive Protection Scheme for Renewable Integrated Microgrid—A Case Study

Abstract

Microgrids integrate different energy sources to provide reliable, eco-friendly and economic dispatch to customer in different areas. The usage of non-conventional energy is recent trend in the area of power system. Different modes of operation are an added advantage to the system. The inclusion of distributed sources in power generation causes operational and control issues. Due to existence of different modes of operation, fault current varies substantially. It is problematic to dragonize fault and prevent it with increase in size of the network. With proper relay coordination, they get ability to island generators whenever not needed. The paper proposes an adaptive protection scheme with over current relays tested in ETAP software. The selected microgrid is RV College of engineering grid located in Bengaluru. The grid is incorporated with different energy resources and verified with case studies. Following this, the design of relay coordination scheme to protect microgrid is made. The complete relay characteristics for various fault positions and circuit breaker operations are studied for the reliability assessment of the developed algorithm and protection scheme.