Smart Adaptive Load Shedding

One of the main research/operational objectives of transmission and distribution electric networks at the present is to enhance the protection system, in order to improve efficiency, reliability and quality of the power delivery to the consumers, while migrating from an electricity generation based on fossil fuels to one based on renewable energy sources.
The self-healing automation in medium and low voltage grids should be carefully investigated, in order to improve the protection system of these grids. One of the most significant and critical factors for power companies is the time that is spent on fault localization and clearing, as a fast fault clearing reduces both the required manpower and economic losses. Today European electric networks have a high reliability, but the changes being operated at both generation (energy sources that are more intermittent and shut-down of thermal plants) and the operation of the transmission and distribution equipment close to the operational limits may led to a reduction of the networks’ security of supply if no new technology innovations or methods are proposed.
The method proposed in this project can easily handle the structural changes of the network, consequence of the uncertain connectivity of renewable energy sources, and paves the way toward Plug-and-Play (PnP) operation enabling the addition and removal of the system elements in a modular fashion way, by means of an automatic and adaptive updating the hard-ware setting according to the current state trajectory of the power system. This approach has the advantage of requiring minimal human intervention and it is especially advantageous in the large power systems, with time varying connectivity of dispersed generations and in which big data is required to be processed in the control centre. Moreover, the proposed method minimises the consequences of communication lost, as well as addresses the in-creasing concerns with Cyber Security.

Main Objectives:
• To reduce the load shed amount during emergency shutdowns;
• To reduce the number of load feeders involved in the load shedding scheme;
• Over frequency avoidance by preventing over load shedding;
• To localise load shedding in vicinity of the affected area;
• Automatic tuning of protection relay settings;
• Decentralized and self-healing scheme;