Higher‐Order Statistics Based Pilot Protection Scheme for Wind Farm Transmission Line Connected to VSC Station

The fault currents generated by direct‐drive wind farms and voltage source converter (VSC) stations differ from those of synchronous generators, posing significant challenges to conventional protection methods that rely on current amplitude or phase‐angle variations. This paper proposes a pilot protection scheme for transmission lines based on higher‐order statistics. The distribution of fault current samples is firstly analysed for both external and internal faults conditions. The differences in the features are quantified by using the third‐order cumulant and kurtosis. On this basis, protection criteria are constructed using a two‐dimensional Euclidean distance to combine these statistics. PSCAD/EMTDC simulation studies confirm that the proposed scheme can rapidly and reliably identify faults under various fault locations, types, transition resistances, and inception angles. Compared to conventional and alternative pilot protection, the proposed scheme exhibits superior sensitivity, speed, and robustness, particularly in high‐resistance fault scenarios and weak‐source conditions.