March 30, 2021
See You Again Next Year at the Texas A&M Conference
We enjoyed participating in the Texas A&M Conference for Protection Relay Engineers this year! Even though the conference was virtual, we were still able to connect with other engineers, share ideas, and discuss our innovative services. Check out our conference highlights below.
Pre-Conference Seminar
On the first day of the conference, we hosted a virtual seminar on methods for standardizing and automating the development of protection and control drawings and relay settings. We discussed the importance and benefits of maintaining a utility-wide standard for these processes in order to reduce errors, maintain consistency, and increase reliability, and we also introduced our automation tool, SARA, which helps to streamline these processes.
We also discussed NERC PRC-027-1, one of the most recent NERC standards, which requires utilities to have an established process for relay setting development by April of 2021. We outlined the details for complying with this standard as well as strategies and examples for achieving compliance.
For a copy of our presentation, please email us.
Conference Presentations
In addition to our class, we presented two papers during the conference as well:
“Auto-tuned Solution to Wide Area Coordination Issues of Distance and Directional Time Overcurrent Relay Settings” was presented by Nathan Thomas, SynchroGrid Software and Automation Lead.
This paper discusses a generalized solution for automatic wide area coordination by incorporating our framework for distance protective elements, more contingencies in fault studies, and overcurrent curve parameter for DOCRs. In addition, the framework can now suggest alternatives to the engineer (e.g., a minor CTI adjustment for a relay) when complete coordination under all contingencies is not possible. Together, these new contributions enable it to perform a realistic wide area coordination of all the protective elements on real-world power systems.
“Selecting, Implementing and Overcoming Challenges when Selecting a Coordination Criteria for Wide Area Applications” was presented by Naveen Ganta, SynchroGrid Relay Setting Engineer.
This paper discusses methods for determining coordination criteria for a Wide Area Coordination study by taking different scenarios and system configurations into consideration. The paper also reviews various challenges that may arise when implementing the adopted coordination criteria and provides recommendations to overcome those challenges.
SynchroGrid Sponsor Hour
SynchroGrid also hosted a sponsor hour in our networking lounge midway through the conference. We were excited to have so many attendees join, and we enjoyed providing a demonstration of our relay setting automation software tool, SARA. To learn more about SARA or schedule a demo for your utility, please contact us.
