Evaluating the Effect of Environmental Conditions on Microgrid Protection

During the past few years, it can be concluded that, in order to decrease the impact of fossil fuel based generation on the environment, the new vision is to generate electricity from cleaner energy sources, closer to the consumption areas. Microgrids (MGs) are low voltage grids which have been proposed as an effective way to connect distributed generation (DG) sources and storage devices via distribution feeders to small loads. In general, a MG can work both in the mode with connection to the grid and in isolated mode. As results, MGs provide several advantages such as uninterrupted service to customer, improved reliability, power quality and operational optimality over conventional distribution systems. Alongside these advantages, there are also disadvantages. Some of these disadvantages is related to protection, in fact, traditional protection and coordination methods may be inapplicable for establishing effective protection for MG. in this paper the effects of environmental conditions on MG protection were evaluated. For this work, the behavior of protective relays are studied for a typical MG which is equipped with solar units with different efficiency, maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method and various places. For this purpose, simulations were made in MATLAB environment