The Why of Adaptive Protections in Modern Electrical Networks

Abstract

Electrical networks are evolving and taking on more challenges as the inclusion of renewable energy and distributed generation units increase, specially at distribution levels. Big trends of generating electricity with alternative and renewable resources has promoted the formation of distribution networks subsystems or micro grids, capable of supplying their own electric demand and to export energy to the interconnected system, if necessary. However, the effects of these generation units into the network and into the microgrid as well are many, as harmonic distortion, voltage flickers and especially in electrical protections. This paper provides an overview about implementation of renewable energy and distributed generation worldwide, as well as an introduction to microgrids concept and its main impacts and challenges into the electric systems. Finally, the main impacts of microgrid on protection equipments are presented at a distribution level, being adaptive protections one of the solutions to the dynamic changes of the electric system.

Keywords

• distributed generation
• distributed energy resources
• smart grids
• microgrids
• adaptive protections