Challenges and mitigation techniques in adaptive protection for microgrids: comprehensive review

Abstract

Microgrids (MGs) are growing in popularity as a result of its benefits to the environment and economy, as well as minimal power losses and smaller infrastructure. In recent years, conventional power grids are being transformed into smart grids, with the establishment of MGs, which connects various units of distributed generation (DG), local energy storage devices and loads to distribution systems. The practical deployment of MG faces various technological obstacles. One of the most important difficulties in MG architecture is designing a reliable protection mechanism. The magnitude of fault current, active DG, two-way power flow, higher impedance value and communication network quality are the key problems in designing an effective protection approach for AC MGs. Due to its ability to overcome these issues and its capability for real time alternation of its protection settings in response to conditions and state of operation of power system, adaptive protection schemes under are gaining more attention from the researchers in AC MGs Protection. The past research works of adaptive protection are addressed and structured systematically in this review to enable researchers run literature studies and identify relevant research works more effectively.