The ECCANDE Project: Design, Field Implementation, and Operation of a Special Protection Scheme Based on Synchronized Phasor Measurements

This paper presents the ECCANDE project, one of the first Special Protection Schemes (SPS) conceived to rely on the structure of a Wide-Area Monitoring, Protection, and Control System (WAMPACS) and currently operating in a real, large-sized power system. This project was developed and implemented to enable the interconnection between the Argentinean and Paraguayan bulk power transmission systems, which involves and directly affects two of the largest hydropower plants in the world (the Itaipu and Yacyreta power plants). Building this WAMPACS-based SPS took more than a decade of work performed by multiple teams, involving modeling, planning studies, design, manufacturing, real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation for equipment testing, implementation, commissioning, field tests and evaluation of daily operation. The paper describes how system stability problems (detected during the initial studies for the interconnection) made it clear that the ECCANDE SPS had to be a WAMPACS-based one, and how its architecture and logic functions were conceived to deal with these problems. The results of HIL real-time simulations and a main field test show that the ECCANDE SPS enabled the interconnection, successfully protecting against the loss of synchronism between the Itaipu and Yacyreta power plants before the system separation.