Determining potential passive islanding detection indicators for single-point single inverter, single-point multi-inverter and multi-point multi-inverter scenarios

Abstract

Distributed Generation (DG) sources predominantly renewable energy-based like solar photovoltaic and wind energy sources are considerably penetrated in power system networks. This high penetration of DG sources may lead to the formation of unintentional islands which is hazardous to both the equipment and personnel, if sustained. In this paper, 46 passive parameters are considered to find out which candidate(s) are promising for detecting sustained unintentional islands and avoid false DG trips. These 46 parameters are derived from point of common coupling (PCC) voltage, DG output current, frequency, power factor angle, active and reactive powers. All these parameters are tested on standard IEEE 13 and 34 bus distribution networks integrated with inverter-interfaced DGs at different locations for different penetration levels in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. The parameters are tested for different islanding events (comprising of various local loads such as conventional parallel RLC resonant load, R, RC, and RL loads) and for different non-islanding events. The parameters are then ranked accordingly by a suitable averaging approach based performance ranking technique. From this analysis, the best candidates are obtained for detecting inverter DG islands at single-point (or single PCC) location and multi-point (or multiple PCCs) locations. Multiple best passive candidates are obtained for different island scenarios from which a set of promising islanding detection indicators are proposed.