Engineer it first — Before you test it!

The paper discusses some of the engineering practices that have been used to design modern protection systems - most of which preclude the ability to field test them for either commissioning or routine testing requirements. This results in long term costs that far exceed the short term gain of the initial cost of the installed system. This paper makes specific recommendations to improve this “up front” engineering of the protection system so that field testing can be economically performed while easily meeting requirements of NERC/CIP documentation. Testing methods presented based on these engineering improvements provides long term cost reductions, operational improvements, and advantages in trouble shooting a protection scheme.