Benefits of using telecommunication based protection with DG

As the number of distributed generation (DG) units connected to medium voltage (MV) networks increases the structure of networks is changing and getting more complex. As a result the requirements for protection are getting more and more complicated and are playing an increasingly important role. Protection of DG units with traditional protection schemes causes performance degradation and in some cases sufficient protection levels may become unattainable. In this paper the issues with traditional protection are addressed. The benefits of using of using telecommunication based protection schemes with DG are presented from which the most important advantages are improved selectivity and decreased fault clearing times.