Particularities of inverter-based generators short-circuit currents and their impacts on electric power distribution network protection

Despite its many benefits, the Distributed Generation (DG) can adversely affect some aspects related to the operation performance of distribution networks, still no so deeply explored in the literature, mainly regarding to the inverter-based DGs and their interaction with the distribution system protection. This paper shows the particularities of inverter-based generators currents to different types of faults. The impacts of these generators on distribution network protection schemes are also investigated. The results show that depending on characteristics such as penetration level, DG output power, fault location and fault resistance the short-circuit current of the generators behave in different ways, also causing impacts on the distribution networks as protection miscoordination.