Evaluating the Loss of Communications in Distribution Protection Systems using GridLAB-D

Protection in distribution systems is vital for maintaining reliability and ensuring proper power quality is provided to the end-use customer. As more switching devices are deployed on distribution systems, traditional protection schemes are giving way to more advanced, and sometimes centrally coordinated, protection schemes that rely on communications infrastructure. With these communications-dependent systems, the behaviors of the protection with and without the communications infrastructure must be examined. This work has evaluated the impacts of loss of communication in centrally coordinated protection schemes. Two test cases were examined: a sequence of similar faults on a feeder before and after a topology reconfiguration, and a feeder with a photovoltaic (PV) fault current contribution. Both simulations are run in the GridLAB-DTM simulation environment. A simple connectivity model is used to represent communication status. The results reveal that a failure of the communication system can cause significantly different protection behavior. This analysis can be used as a basis for utility engineers to make an informed decision on the impacts of communication losses on their system, as well as evaluating ways to mitigate its impact on the resiliency of the system.