Guidelines document for helping utility protection engineers determine when additional anti-islanding studies are prudent

As PV deployment levels rise, utility protection engineers are increasingly being asked to deal with questions about islanding, and whether any particular situation presents an elevated risk. Unfortunately, the tools available have not always kept pace with the rapid rate of change of PV technology, and thus protection engineers are sometimes forced to be excessively pessimistic in order to ensure system security. This paper describes a recently-written document intended to help alleviate some of this problem by helping protection engineers to know when islanding is not a significant risk, and situations in which additional study may be prudent. This guidelines document is publicly available from Sandia National Laboratories.