SYSTEM FOR INTEGRATION OF PROTECTION AND CONTROL DEVICES

SUMMARY CHESF is one of the largest and most important utilities in Brazil. It is responsible for the generation and transmission of power for nearly 50 million people in Northeast Brazil. CHESF's power system comprises 97 substations and 18,232 km of transmission lines, 96 % in the levels of 230 and 500 kV, covering approximately 1,200,000 km 2 . Many substations are located far away from the maintenance centers, bringing difficulties when an immediate action is needed in the field. One of the ideas is to decentralize the maintenance process as much as possible. On the other hand, this involves many organizational difficulties as well as high costs. Intelligent Electronic Devices (IED) have been largely used for a number of applications in the area of Protection, Control and Automation. IEDs incorporate themselves a number of new features such as the supervision of trip logics and voltage/current analog inputs, therefore contributing for the minimization of hidden failures. New IED features are also important for relay selectivity studies as well as for supervision and post fault analysis. Accessing information from IEDs is still difficult. In many situations it is necessary to move specialized personnel to the substations for this purpose causing last minute problems and inconveniences like expenditures not previously planned. Post fault analysis and improvements in relay coordination studies have been performed using the resources available so far, sometimes leading to incomplete conclusions or even reissuing new analyses. Depending on the situation the response time becomes a very important point of the process of Disturbance Analysis. It is a requirement as per the rules of the Brazilian Grid Procedures that Power Companies respond promptly, and also provide appropriate documentation * gustavoa@chesf.gov.br 21, rue d'Artois, F-75008 PARIS B5_101_2010 CIGRE 201