A New Method for Blocking Third-Zone Distance Relays During Stable Power Swings

The improper operation of the third-zone distance protection has been attributed as one of the factors for power system blackouts. The third-zone protection could incorrectly operate during power-swing scenarios. This research proposes a fast and practical methodology using local measurements for blocking the third-zone distance relays during stable power swings. The proposed scheme is referred to as the BTZ scheme. The proposed method calculates the relative speed of a fictitious equivalent machine from the local relay measurements. If the relative speed goes through a zero crossing, the swing is classified as a stable power swing; whereas if the speed does not go through a zero value, then the swing is classified as an unstable power swing. The benefit of the proposed method is that it analyzes the power swings from a system stability point of view, and does not need rigorous offline simulation studies to determine the relay settings. The performance of the proposed method in this paper is compared with an industry-standard method (conventional double blinder method). As is well known, the settings of the blinder-based methods are system specific and need several simulations to arrive at the blinder values. Transient simulation studies on a three-bus system and a modified Western Coordination Council 9-bus system are used to test the performance of the proposed approach.