Enhancing Distance Protection of Long Transmission Lines Compensated With TCSC and Connected With Wind Power

Thyristor controlled series compensation (TCSC) is widely used in long transmission lines to mainly improve power transfer capability. However, TCSC produces complicated impedance that negatively affects distance protection operation. The wind energy generation system produces additional complexity to the distance protection performance due to the variation of wind speed and fault current level. This paper proposes an integrated scheme to change adaptively the settings of the Mho distance protection by shifting the relay characteristics considering the bad impacts of TCSC, wind power and fault resistance. The proposed scheme achieves its main stages starting from fault detection, until relay tripping decision procedure including online estimation for preliminary fault location, impedance of TCSC and fault resistance using limited communication requirements. By extensive MATLAB simulations, the performance of the proposed scheme is examined compared with the conventional Mho relays under different fault locations, fault inception angle, fault resistance, different wind power penetration, different wind speeds and different TCSC firing angles. The achieved results ensured that the proposed scheme improves significantly Mho distance relay operation and avoids under-reaching and over-reaching problems irrespective of the large shunt capacitance along the transmission line, and also without identifying the parameters of TCSC such as the capacitance, the inductance or the firing angle.