Prevention of Reliability Degradation from Recloser–Fuse Miscoordination Due To Distributed Generation

Distributed generation (DG) may bring about reliability degradation, instead of reliability enhancement, due to recloser-fuse miscoordination. For the prevention of this reliability degradation, this paper proposes a method to find the threshold value of the DG capacity, beyond which recloser-fuse coordination is lost. Mathematical equations for protective devices are used to set up the protection settings and calculate the threshold value. Three reliability indices-SAIFI, SAIDI, and ENS-are evaluated and compared with the study cases in the reliability test system RBTS bus 2. The results show that the proposed method is effective to prevent the deterioration of system reliability. In addition, a simple modification to the protection system is presented as a preliminary solution.