New time domain distance protection for renewable connected and series compensated transmission lines

The nature of today's power transmission networks is getting more complicated and dynamic. Fast, secure, and dependable protection decisions are required for systems that interface with power electronic converters, such as renewable energy resources, series compensated lines, HVDC, FACTS, etc. In these networks, the phasor-based distance protection is prone to reliability problems and has intrinsic speed limitations. In order to satisfy the modern grid protection requirements, we developed a time domain-based protection solution for using incremental quantities of the voltage and currents measured at relay location. The proposed method identified the fault zone by comparing a dynamic restraining quantity which is calculated for the fault zone boundary point with the actual rate of change of current measured at the relay location. The method is implemented in relay platform and validated with both RTDS and field data. The performance of the proposed method is found to be secure, reliable, and fast for lines connected with inverter based renewable resources and series compensated lines.