Experiences and conclusions towards a harmonized process for the certification of equipment connected to the electricity network: islanding prevention

Manufacturers of equipment to be connected to the electricity network, in the new liberalized market, have to evidence compliance with the new requirements that are expected to be asked. In the same way, certification laboratories have to undertake a great investment to purchase new measurement equipment and train personnel to continue to fulfil their aim as accredited certification bodies in the electricity sector and, more concretely, in the distributed energy resources interconnection, power quality and EMC domains. This paper describes some conclusions based on the experiences of LABEIN-Tecnalia, as a well known accredited certification entity, with the objective to illustrate the efforts carried out, mainly in the field of islanding prevention. The paper starts from a description of the accreditation and compliance processes, it features a new laboratory specification, and then analyzes the first experimental tests and results to show the capabilities of the laboratory, in order to verify that a system connected to the electricity grid is compliant with the islanding requirements.