Wide Area Autonomous Restoration System for Medium Voltage Distribution Networks

The penetration of the smart grid components and communication technologies into the conventional power system networks makes possible of autonomous reconfiguration actions in case of disturbances. The autonomous capability of the system that is called “Self-Healing” reduces both the fault isolation and service restoration durations with the help of measurement devices, logical operations, and switching equipment. There are several different philosophies and architectures to perform self-healing maneuvers such as; i-) centralized approach using SCADA/DMS ii-) semi-centralized technique with substation controller and iii-) peer-peer scheme utilizing intelligent electronic devices. In order to implement various aforementioned architectures and observe the improvement in continuity of supply indices, Sakarya Electricity Distribution Company (SEDAS) initiated “Self-Healing Distribution Networks” R &D project with the consultancy of ÅF Turkey. In this study, a self-healing topology entitled Wide Area Autonomous Restoration System (WAARS) was proposed and the system was applied to a selected region of SEDAS containing 67 secondary substations. The theoretical calculations have been conducted to quantify the improvement in interruption duration per customer. Also, technical constraints of network such as ampacity and voltage drops were taken into consideration.