Implementation of the Security-Dependability Adaptive Voting Scheme

As the world moves further into the 21st century, the electricity demand worldwide continues to rapidly grow. The power systems that supply this growing demand continue to be pushed closer to their limits. When those limits are exceeded, system blackouts occur that have massive societal and economical impact.

Power system protection relays make up a piece of these limits and can be important factors in preventing or causing a system blackout. The purpose of this thesis is to present a working implementation of an adaptive protection scheme known as the adaptive voting scheme, used to alter the security/dependability balance of protection schemes. It is argued that as power system conditions change, the ability of protection relays to adjust the security/dependability balance based on those conditions can allow relays to play a part in preventing power system catastrophes.

It is shown that the adaptive voting scheme can be implemented on existing protection technology given Wide Area Measurements (WAMs) provided by Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). The proposed implementation characteristics allow numerous existing protection practices to be used without changing the basic operation of the practices.