Wide-area backup protection and protection performance analysis scheme using PMU data

Abstract This paper presents a wide-area backup protection scheme that incorporates protection performance analysis based solely on voltage from Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). The system reports and summarizes information relating to fault detection, and identification of the faulted circuit(s) protection/circuit breaker operation (i.e. whether it is correct or not), in a short period of time. It can also be applied as an effective and relatively simple, fast, wide-area backup protection to improve the resilience of power systems. Case studies are presented, where the proposed wide-area backup protection scheme is validated using the IEEE 14-bus network. It is demonstrated that the proposed scheme is capable of correctly detecting faults (including high-resistance faults) in less than 100 ms from fault inception and can report on whether the protection/circuit breakers have operated as expected within a further 100 ms, thereby coordinating with existing protection systems with a view to enhancing the system reliability and security by appending existing protection systems with system-wide information. Applicability of the developed system to large-scale power systems is also demonstrated. Discussion relating to how this method can be cost effective through exploitation of existing PMU data, which may already be used for other purposes, is included.