Issues and challenges in microgrid protection

Abstract

The clean and green distributed generations (DGs) are the most potent alternative of the conventional fossil fuel-based plants to supply rising demands of electricity and reduce the environmental pollution level. Therefore, the distribution level microgrids have been gaining popularity in recent years. The existing power distribution systems are designed to fulfill the electricity demands of past and present, but require substantial modifications for future microgrid applications. Further, the reliability and uninterrupted power supply can only be ensured by robust protection schemes. The performance of the existing relaying schemes gets severely affected due to the challenges imposed by the operation and control philosophy of the microgrid. Thus, devising new protection schemes are necessary for fast detection of faults and isolation of faulty section to minimize disruption in power supply to the consumers. The first section of this chapter provides a brief introduction to microgrids and the performance requirements of the microgrid protection schemes. The second section highlights the challenges faced by the existing relaying schemes in microgrids. A literature survey about the developed microgrid protection schemes is presented in the third section. Then the new protection schemes developed for mitigation of the challenges are described in section five. Section six concludes the chapter and also shows the possible future works of the presented study. � 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.