Determining Unintentional Island Threshold to Enhance the Reliability in an Electrical Distribution Grid

Abstract

Due to the significant number of distributed generators in the electric power system, islanding detection requirements are becoming an increasingly prominent aspect of the power system. The island detection system depends on accurate threshold determination since an incorrect threshold might result in a hazardous situation. To evaluate the proposed method’s capacity to discriminate between different events, this study examined different unintentional islanding conditions such as under frequency and over frequency. The purpose of this study is to establish the threshold of the under and over frequency island conditions. The under frequency island condition happens when the distributed generator (DG) capacity exceeds the amount of connected load; on the other hand, the over frequency island condition happens during a higher connected load compared to the capacity of the DG. The contribution of this research is to propose an unintentional island threshold setting technique based on bus voltage angle difference data of the phasor measurement unit (PMU). In the PowerWorld simulator, the Utility Kerteh (location: Terengganu, Malaysia) bus system has been designed and simulated in this work. The test system has four distinct islanding scenarios under two conditions, and the performance of the proposed methods demonstrates that for the under frequency islanding conditions the scenario’s threshold can be taken at a minimum of 40 milliseconds (ms) and a maximum of 60 ms, while the over frequency condition island threshold can be placed at a minimum of 60 ms and a maximum of 80 ms depending on the scenarios. Therefore, the proposed technique will be contributed to increase the reliability of the overall distribution grid so the unintentional island can be detected faster in terms of time.