Reliability Study of HV Substations Equipped With the Fault Current Limiter

Of particular interest to restrict the short-circuit level of interconnected power systems is to exploit fault current limiter (FCL) technologies. FCLs let the system planners devise new reliable and rather economical substation configurations and provide the possibility of proposing a promising cost-effective and prompt solution to the fault current over duty problem in the existing substations. This paper attempts to assess reliability of substation architectures accommodating the FCL operation and, besides, numerically investigates the FCL´s impacts on the substation reliability indices. In order to clarify the proposed approach, two case studies with and without FCL are analyzed and compared. Although the discussions raised here are applicable for reliability modeling of all structures, five common substation configurations, namely: (1) single-bus single-breaker; (2) double-bus single-breaker; (3) ring bus; (4) one breaker and a half; and (5) double-bus double-breaker are considered in this paper. Numerical studies reveal that FCL deployment, while keeping the maximal flexibility of substation, may deteriorate the reliability indices of the substation due to the possible failures of FCLs.