Grid Transition: New Generation Methodologies and Tools for Reliable Protection

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Electrification, one of the most important engineering achievements of the 20th century, has led to large-scale power systems. Electricity powers almost every activity and enterprise in modern society. Electrical energy must be produced and delivered in larger quantities and under increasingly stringent conditions of reliability, sustainability, cost, and environmental impacts. Modern power systems are therefore increasingly complex. Power systems are in the process of transition to hybrid and electronic systems accommodating High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) connections, control systems developed with advanced communication networks, static compensators, and higher shares of renewable energy sources also tagged as Inverter-based Resources (IBRs). The technology driving this transition is the Voltage Source Converter (VSC) which is a type of power electronics converters. It is the essential grid-integration component in these "new" resources and connections. VSCs can provide advanced grid services with fast response times. Their dynamics and inherent characteristics are different from well-studied and documented conventional electromechanical synchronous generators. The increasing installations of VSC based resources and connections affect the dynamic behavior and fault response of power systems. The existing computer tools and methods available to system operators are not necessarily designed with the dynamic response and control schemes of VSCs in mind. A fault in power systems is any abnormal current. Faults happen frequently and need to be cleared very quickly for the safety of equipment, people, and system in general. Present system protection schemes are designed using traditional protection models and simple approaches that normally fail to recognize the specific characteristics of VSCs, thus leading to very conservative or ineffective protection schemes. Several protection elements have been demonstrated to be influenced by the integration of IBRs either by simulations or recorded events. There is a need to understand the collective impact of increased integration of IBRs on short-circuit levels and the performance of the existing protection schemes throughout the network. The existing impact studies mainly consider limited or isolated integration of IBRs such as tie line configurations. The current expansion and integration of renewable energy sources in the world strongly relies on mathematical models and advanced simulation tools. This is also the case in Canada and North America. The models allow designing control strategies, planning, and protection schemes. Today, practicing engineers try to study and analyze their "new" systems with their existing tools and models. This proposal will advance the knowledge in the field of modern energy grids and provide a step forward in their reliable protection and hence operation by offering new modeling, analysis, control, and simulation methodologies.