Verification of Adaptive Protection in Hardware in the Loop for Coordination with Solar Variability |
Adam Summers1, Trupal Patel1, Dan Kelly1, Emilio C. Piesciorovsky2, Matthew J. Reno1 1Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, United States /2Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge , TN, United States |
As inverter-based resources continue to be installed at all levels of the electric grid, the fixed protection schemes used at the distribution level will continue to be stressed until they no longer ensure the protection of the grid. Adaptive protection has been proposed as a solution with the ability to update the protection schemes in near real-time to ensure reliability and increase the resilience of the grid. However, weather variability poses a significant challenge to the ability of these methods to keep the selectivity and reliability of these schemes coordinated. If the ramp rates, due to solar variability, of the inverter-based resources change faster than the adaptive protection can issue new settings the protection system could be uncoordinated, with the wrong device responding to a system fault. The proposed adaptive protection method ensures that due to solar variability, communication, and protection calculation latency, it can issue coordinated protection settings promptly, in one minute or less. The preliminary results show the protection settings being issued and maintaining system coordination. The final paper will include a variety of solar variability issues that the proposed method will be evaluated against. |