Reliability Assessment of High Voltage Direct Current Grid Protection Schemes

Recent renewable energy developments in the power system have prompted a growing interest in high voltage direct current (DC) grids. One of the challenges impeding the progress of high voltage DC grids is the design of DC protection systems. This paper presents the development of an energy reliability program which differentiates between the energy reliability performances of five different DC protection schemes. The energy reliability program utilized contingency enumeration to iterate through all network states of the high voltage DC grid. The conditions used by the program for network state differentiation were formulated from minimal cut‐sets. The energy reliability analysis results discussed in this study illustrate that the double‐bus single breaker protection scheme has the most favourable performance. These results contribute knowledge to the design of DC protection schemes of high voltage DC grids.