Impact of Cascade Disconnection of Distributed Energy Resources on Bulk Power System Stability: Modeling and Mitigation Requirements

This work presents a new approach to establishing the minimum requirements for anti-islanding protection of distributed energy resources (DERs) with focus on bulk power system stability. The proposed approach aims to avoid cascade disconnection of DERs during major disturbances in the transmission network and to compromise as little as possible the detection of real islanding situations. The proposed approach concentrates on the rate-of-change of frequency (RoCoF) protection function and it is based on the assessment of dynamic security regions with the incorporation of a new and straightforward approach to represent the disconnection of DERs when analyzing the bulk power system stability. Initially, the impact of disconnection of DERs on the Brazilian Interconnected Power System (BIPS) stability is analyzed, highlighting the importance of modeling such disconnection in electromechanical stability studies, even considering low penetration levels of DERs. Then, the proposed approach is applied to the BIPS, evidencing its benefits when specifying the minimum requirements of anti-islanding protection, without overestimating them.