Power system islanding detection based on wide area measurement systems

A fast islanding detection tool can help power dispatchers monitor and control power system operations. Frequency monitoring network (FNET) is a low cost and quickly deployable wide-area phasor measurement system at the distribution level. The frequency disturbance recorder (FDR) in FNET is actually a single-phase phasor measurement unit (PMU) in the sense that it measures the voltage phase angle, amplitude, and frequency from a single-phase voltage source. Based on the data collected by the FDRs deployed in the North American power grid, two islanding detection methods, the frequency difference method and the change of angle difference method, are proposed. The six cases, including islanding cases, a generation trip case and a load shedding case, are presented to verify the proposed methods of islanding detection. The results show that the proposed methods can correctly detect power system islanding, and will not be falsely triggered by generation trips and load shedding.