Intelligent protective relaying for the series compensated line with high penetration of wind energy sources

The bulk amount of power generated from the present-day large-scale DFIG-installed wind farms are preferably transmitted to utility grid through series compensated transmission lines. Currently, TCSC compensation is more attractive compared to fixed series compensation due to its numerous technical advantages. However, the nonlinear relationship of the output power verses wind speed and the different operating modes of the DFIG and TCSC cause rapid variation in the line impedance during both normal as well as fault conditions. Consequently, the widely used fixed impedance-based distance relays when used for protection of such lines find limitation. In this paper, a fast discrete S-transform feature-assisted back propagation neural network technique is proposed using the relay end current measurements for effective detection and classification of faults in such crucial transmission lines. The efficacy of the scheme is evaluated on numerous fault and non-fault cases simulated through MATLAB/Simulink on different standard test systems under varying system operating conditions. The results clearly show the superiority of the proposed method in comparision to the existing approaches in terms of its low computational burden, fast fault detection time (< 10 ms) and accuracies (= 100 %) and fast fault classification time (< 10 ms) and accuracies (99.99 %).