Abstract
PRC-027-1 is an upcoming NERC Protection and Control Reliability Standard that is intended to ensure the continual maintenance of coordination for protection systems associated with Bulk Electric System (BES) elements. Expected to come into effect in October 2020, the PRC-027-1 Reliability Standard will require utilities that own protection systems installed to identify and isolate faults on BES elements, to establish formal procedures in a range of aspects to support maintenance of Protection System Coordination performance. One aspect of the requirements will mandate that applicable entities develop a process for the execution of Protection System Coordination Studies for protection systems associated with BES elements. These requirements can pose significant challenges to utilities and other applicable entities; in addition to the technical engineering effort associated with the execution of Protection System Coordination Studies, complying with PRC-027-1 also necessitates significant workflow management and data processing considerations. This paper discusses one potential approach to enable compliance with the PRC-027-1 requirements. This approach covers process and data management considerations and provides a framework workflow for the obtaining and comparison of fault currents, execution and review of coordination studies, and processing and documentation of results to support proof of compliance with the PRC-027-1 Reliability Standard. The central concept of the approach under discussion is the utilization of software-based automation in a number of key tasks. Firstly, determination, comparison, and recording of fault currents is achieved through the employment of custom-written applications interfacing with industry-standard power system simulation software. Secondly, the execution of large-scale Protection System Coordination Studies is largely automated through utilization of specialized scripts running within the simulation software packages. Thirdly, the vast amounts of data inherent in the Protection System Coordination Study results are processed in a manner that assists protection engineers in the identification and resolution of coordination issues. Finally, auditor friendly automated compliance summaries are generated that can be used as a record of compliance.
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