Protection against Power System Blackouts

Emergency processes developing in power systems, when every disturbance triggers a next one, and so on, result in blackouts, i.e. mass-scale tripping of generating sources and disruption of electricity supply over large areas. Such blackouts imply damaged equipment of power plants, interrupted production cycles, chaos in the conditions of people’s lives, and great economic losses. The existing protections employ diversified local automatic devices. However, incessant blackouts evidence that these protections are sometimes insufficient and the structure of protection of power system need to be improved. In the paper a new protection and self-restoration automatic system for blackouts prevention and the resumption of normal operating conditions without staff participation is proposed. The centralized component inclusion in this structure will ensure the hierarchical operating principles of the protection system at a higher level