Laboratory Evaluation of a Phasor-Based Islanding Detection Method

Szymon Barczentewicz,Tomasz Lerch,Andrzej Bień,Krzysztof Duda

doi:10.3390/en14071953

Abstract

Constantly growing distributed energy generation based on renewable sources creates a number of new challenges for electrical power system operation. One of the challenges is islanding detection. Unintentional islanding, which can cause health and safety hazards for the personnel, is currently being experienced by a growing number of consumers/prosumers especially in the case of photovoltaic inverters. This work presents a new islanding detection method based on synchrophasor measurements. The proposed method works in either a passive or hybrid mode. In a passive mode, a single phasor measurement unit (PMU) in the island region is used. In a hybrid mode, one PMU in the island and another one outside the island are exploited. The proposed method was verified in conducted laboratory tests that confirmed the applicability of PMUs data for effective detection and monitoring of unintentional islanding.

Highlights

In [33], a comprehensive and thorough comparison of different islanding detection methods was presented. This comparison showed that for the most recent methods of islanding detection [31,32,33], depending on the nature of the perturbations introduced, detection time stayed in the range of 100 ms to 900 ms
Taking into account the times of the first trip and remembering about the threshold τ 4 for all of the tested cases, the method was able to detect islanding in times shorter than 300 ms
The conducted laboratory tests proved that a phasor measurement unit (PMU) is a useful instrument for islanding detection

Summary

Introduction

Growing distributed energy generation based on renewable sources creates a number of new challenges for electrical power system operation. One of the challenges is islanding detection. Unintentional islanding, which can cause health and safety hazards for the personnel, is currently being experienced by a growing number of consumers/prosumers especially in the case of photovoltaic inverters. This work presents a new islanding detection method based on synchrophasor measurements. The proposed method works in either a passive or hybrid mode. A single phasor measurement unit (PMU) in the island region is used. One PMU in the island and another one outside the island are exploited. The proposed method was verified in conducted laboratory tests that confirmed the applicability of PMUs data for effective detection and monitoring of unintentional islanding

Methods

Results

Conclusion