A 5G communication-based wide area protection concept for enabling resilient and reliable loss of mains protection

As the share of intermittent distributed energy resources (DER) keeps growing, it is ever more important to ensure that these resources contribute to the stability of power systems. This is ensured by requiring system supporting control features such as fault ride through, voltage control and frequency control from DER, and by ensuring that unwanted tripping of Loss of Mains (LoM) protection does not occur. This paper presents a wide area protection concept designed for enhancing the resiliency of LoM protection to system wide frequency events. The proposed method includes a wireless intertrip functionality for reducing the risk of unintentional islanding. The functioning of the proposed scheme was verified by hardware-in-the-loop simulation tests.