Wide area protection and fault location : review and evaluation of PMU-based methods

Wide area protection (WAP) systems use multiple sources of information to improve trip times and reduce the complexity of protection settings. Therefore, such communications-enhanced schemes have the potential to replace conventional transmission system backup protection. Through review and assessment of the present state-of-the-art relating to WAP systems, this paper demonstrates how multiple synchrophasor data sources, and the associated communications systems, can be leveraged to enable new forms of supervisory protection. Two case studies are presented: a scalable WAP architecture for future decentralised power systems, and the validation a prototype WAP system, using the principle of distributed photonic sensing, highlighting how new tools can provide cost-effective solutions to emerging protection challenges.