Reliability Assessment of Protection Schemes for Series Compensated Transmission Lines

Series capacitors are used in transmission lines for enhancing power transmission limit. However, they complicate the line's protection due to impedance change of the line, voltage inversion, current inversion and sub-synchronous oscillation. Distance and differential protections are used in different arrangements in transmission line protection. Often they are used together as main and backup protection. In this paper, the fault tree method is used to compare the reliability of three common transmission line protection schemes. The schemes considered here are distance (main)-distance (backup) (Z, Z). differential (main)-distance (backup) (Δ, Z) and differential (main)-differential (backup) (Δ, Δ). Fault trees are used to calculate the reliability of protection schemes in terms of both unavailability and failure rate. The analyses show that, for series compensated lines, using distance protection reduces protection system reliability. Differential protection performs best in terms of reliability despite depending entirely on communication.