Development of an Automatic Power Supply Restoration System in Distributed Generation Networks

Abstract

A tendency toward decreasing the power system inertia caused by a growth in the share of renewable energy sources, taken together with possible unavailability of communication channels, generates the need to develop new approaches to implementing algorithms for emergency control of devices in networks with distributed generation. An algorithm for automatically restoring power supply in such networks is proposed, which relies on local measurements and does not require high-speed communication channels. The algorithm has been validated in an RTDS real-time simulator using a 10.5 kV network model. Two scenarios for checking the algorithm performance were considered: a transition of the network to an island mode resulted from the trip of the main circuit breaker, and a short circuit fault on an outgoing feeder with both successful and unsuccessful automatic reclosing. In the first scenario, the mean time taken to fully restore the power supply was 0.322 s, and in the second scenario this time was equal to 3.637 s in the case of a self-clearing short circuit fault. The simulation results have confirmed the algorithm’s effectiveness in various network operation modes, due to which it holds promise for use in microgrids located in remote areas with minimal operational staff.