Impact of Wind Generation on Line Protection

Renewable energy-based generation like photovoltaic or wind farms present a different response to short circuit than conventional synchronous generators due to their coupling trough power electronics-based inverters. Those inverter-based resources behave like current sources as opposed to voltage sources and their short circuit current, including negative sequence component, is highly determined by their control system. Therefore, protection functions like directional and non-directional overcurrent, phase selector, distance protection and directional comparison might malfunction. This paper introduces the basic concepts of Wind Turbines (WT) and their fault response, analyzing their impact on the aforementioned function protections.