E-REDES’ integration tool for distance protection tests

E-REDES, the main Portuguese distribution system operator (DSO), has an extensive protection asset portfolio with protection relays ranging from the 1970s to today from multiple manufacturers. Nowadays, the Portuguese distribution grid has been growing remarkably, mostly due to new interconnections with distributed generation (DG), which are raising challenges not only in power flow analysis but also in protection systems. This challenge is particularly relevant to HV interconnections, where one of the main protection functions is Distance Protection. The Commissioning, which must be performed in a reduced timeframe, needs to be fully tested in terms of currents and voltage circuit orientations to ensure the correct directionality of the Power Flow and zone impedance reaches. To avoid and prevent configuration errors that could arise during the reduced commission stage, the E-REDES team started and developed an Integration tool. This approach was divided into two phases. One comprised an automatic converter to the specific parameters of the most representative relays and in the second phase, a generic XRIO file was developed to assure an overall evaluation of all Distance Protections. This paper intents to present the methodology used the results obtained as well as the knowledge acquired during the project execution and discuss future work.