Facilitating net zero through wide-area protection

To facilitate Net Zero, protection and control of distribution networks needs to evolve. On the one hand, distributed energy resources (DERs) that connect to the distribution networks cause a change to the basic operational principles of distribution networks. On the other hand, the reliability requirements for electricity supply are increasing to ensure a resilient Net Zero future. In this paper, a protection concept utilising virtualisation with wireless 5G communication is proposed, and its operation is verified using laboratory experiments. The developed wide-area protection scheme includes transfer trip, rate of change of frequency (ROCOF) based blocking and adaptive reclosing. It also utilises the exchange of information between sites using Routable Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (R-GOOSE) messaging over 5G. This functionality ensures the prevention of unintentional islanding and unsynchronised reclosing and, at the same time, keeps the DERs connected during transmission system level disturbances. The developed protection concept has been verified in a real-time digital simulation (RTDS) laboratory environment.