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Coordination of Generator and Power System Protection in Korea

J.S.KANG* Y.S.LYU J.J. YANG S.H.BYUN J.H.KIM J.W.CHO

Korea Power Exchange
Republic of Korea

SUMMARY

This paper discusses generator and power system protection coordination developed and
applied in Republic of Korea. Five kinds of coordination methods are introduced. First is
differential protection zone coordination between unit overall and generator. This method can
be applied when the power plant has redundant protection configuration. By implementing
this coordination the selectivity can be improved. Second is high voltage side CT separation.
This method is mainly for preventing the unit overall and transformer differential
misoperation. This method should be applied especially when the high voltage configuration
is one and half CB type. Based on past misoperation case analysis, the relay may trip the
whole unit by external disturbances, if the high voltage CTs are combined before going into
the relay. Third is blocking transformer restricted earth fault protection when the transformer
is ungrounded. There are many digital relays which can inhibit the trip signal when the
ground CT current is not measured, but still some relays omit this feature and make trip signal
even the grounding path is opened. Fourth is using transformer ground overcurrent as backup
protection of the external network. The appropriate time delay should be longer than the
transmission line single phase reclosing process, otherwise the function may misoperate
during healthy condition. Fifth is time coordination between overcurrent and distance relays.
Generator backup distance is scheduled to trip later than the transmission line distance zone-3.
Transformer ground overcurrent is scheduled to trip later than the transmission line reclosing
process. If the directional overcurrent is installed toward the generator feeder faults, the time
should be scheduled earlier than the transmission line distance zone-2 for high voltage side
fault, and earlier than the transmission line distance zone-3 for low voltage side fault.
Considering various fault locations, this paper suggests proper operation priority and time
interval. All coordination methods are explained in detail through the paper.

KEYWORDS

Power System Protection, Protection Coordination, Protection Scheme

toasty@kpx.or.kr
1. INTRODUCTION

After deregulation in 2001, power plants in Korea were built by various owners as either public sector
or private sector. In 2015, the installed generator capacity increased up to 97,000MW. There are 800
bulk power generators owned by 15 different generator companies.

Because each company can have different policy, the power plants’ protection configurations are also
different. Considering the cost of protection system, private generator companies discriminated the
investment on their protection system depending on the financial status or expected financial loss they
would suffer from generator faults. All other major factors like reliability, public benefit, and
protection coordination are often lost or even neglected. Moreover after electricity deregulation, strong
tie between Transmission Owner (TO) and GO became looser. Now they seldom consider each other’s
facilities, their external facilities, and only have interests on their own facilities. As a result, the
protection coordination between transmission network and generator became less important to the
companies.

Under competitive market system, it is the System Operator (SO)’s role to make appropriate
protection coordination and compensate different stakeholder’s protection interest. After major
blackout events in the world, the need of developing unified and standardized protection scheme
became more important[1]. And Korea’s SO noticed that more and more cases are observed
maintaining inappropriate protection coordination. For these reasons, Korea’s SO started to develop
the optimal protection coordination criteria. The purpose of this task is mainly to enhance the
selectivity and sensitivity of protective relays. Both GOs and TOs are required to adjust their original
protection plans to satisfy the coordination criteria. By following suggested guideline, owners will be
able to reduce their risk of undesirable tripping. And they can save substantial financial loss as well.
Overall system reliability is also expected to increase.

2. COORDINATION OF GENERATOR AND POWER SYSTEM

2.1. Coordination Overview

This paper starts with an assumption that the generators have redundant protective relays. This is
because most GOs within the bulk power system do not want any unnecessary tripping by single
protective relay’s fail or misoperation. Redundant protection system is the only solution to minimize
the failure chance[2]. Therefore the owners usually adopt redundant relays to protect their expensive
machine. Frequently used redundancy schemes in Korea are 2 out of 3 voting scheme and duplication
scheme.

This paper focuses on two types of protection coordination between the network and generator. The
first type is the protection zone coordination or protection function coordination. This coordination
includes assigning CT and/or VT inputs, and rearranging protection functions. By doing this,
protection functions can have clearer objective and can work more cooperative as well. The feature of
first type is that the coordination ideas are originated from the protection philosophy of the SO
according to the severity of contingencies, which means that each method implementing the
coordination is containing protection strategy. The second type is pickup and time interval
coordination. This paper especially concentrates on preventing misoperation or unnecessary tripping
of transmission lines.

2.2. Coordination of Unit Overall and Generator Differential Protection

This coordination is related to the role of Generator Circuit Breaker (GCB). The idea starts from the
proposition that if the fault occurs in the generator protection zone, only the GCB will be opened. The
switch yard CBs should remain closed in this case.

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In conventional practices, we used to include the whole generator within the Unit Overall Protection
(87U) zone. Figure 1 shows the conventional type of protection coordination. If the fault occurs at
location (A), we should trip the GCB and the switch yard CBs. In this case switch yard CBs are
tripped unnecessarily.

Figure 1. Conventional Coordination

Figure 2 shows the suggested (new) protection coordination. In the proposed scheme, the 87U does
not include any generator zone. Instead, one of the Generator Differential Protection (87G) zones is
widened to compensate the shortened 87U zone. In this case the fault location (A) is outside the
shortened 87U protection zone. Therefore the high voltage switch yard CBs will not be tripped. The

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biggest advantage of this is that the generator can be connected to the network easily after fixing the
trouble, because all the station auxiliary facilities can remain online during that time. If we designed
the 87U as conventional scheme, the whole unit including Generator Step Up transformer (GSU) and
auxiliaries would shout down. In this situation, the station auxiliary facilities have to start again and
will need much more time to recover standby status. Hence the total unavailable time of the power
station will increase, which will directly affects to the financial loss of the GOs.

Figure 2. Suggested Coordination

Sometimes we can find that the providers of GSU, GCB and the generator are different. In this case
the generator provider usually doesn’t prefer to include the GCB within the 87G protection zones,
because the GCB and its CT equipment are guaranteed by other providers. Moreover this is related to

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the responsibility limits among providers. For example in Figure 2, if the fault occurs at location (C)
due to the defective CB equipment, and unfortunately if 87G does not operate, there can be legal
disputes between the GO and the providers to clarify the responsibility, and the generator provider
may not be able to avoid some portion of responsibility. However, even if the preference is different
among providers, it is the SO’s role to coordinate this issue and lead cooperation from all providers to
enhance the overall reliability and security.

Regarding the two redundant 87G functions, the first one protects only the generator, from the
generator neutral to terminal. And the second one protects from the generator neutral to the
transformer side of GCB, including the CGB itself and the generator terminal. The main reason is to
increase the selectivity, while not losing the reliability. Because the 87U protection zone was
shortened, the overlap between the 87U and 87G has also disappeared. To recover the overlapping
zone, the second 87G has expanded to include the GCB, because the 87U protection zone is reaching
up to the generator side of GCB.

In Table 1, we can find out the improved selectivity by applying the proposed scheme. Each fault
location shows different relay pickup in suggested scheme, while the conventional scheme does not
have fault location discrimination. Because enough information is provided, the users or owners are
able to configure the GCB trip matrix according to their philosophy or preference. For example,
someone wants to configure to trip the high voltage switch yard CB when the 87G second operates,
because this second zone includes the GCB. In this case, they can commission the trip matrix to trip
GCB when 87G first and second operate together, and to trip the high voltage switch yard CB when
only the 87G second operates.

Table 1. Selectivity Comparison

Relay Operation Coordinated Conventional
Fault Location Scheme Scheme
(A) 87G(First/Second) 87G(First/Second), 87U

(B) 87G(Second) 87U

(C) 87G(Second) , 87U 87U

2.3. Coordination of Unit Overall, GSU and Other Network Protection

This coordination is to inhibit the misoperation of differential relays in the power plant. Most of the
time the differential scheme is very reliable and the external fault or disturbance can’t make the relay
misoperation. However, if the high voltage busbar configuration is one and half CB type, the 87U and
GSU Differential Protection (87T) function is pretty prone to calculate wrong decision by external
disturbances[3]. In those situations, the disturbance and other error factors make differential current
enough to operate the function. However bias current is abnormally small which can’t restrain the
differential factor. The main reason is that the high voltage side CT inputs are not separated into the
relay. Figure 3 shows the risk of not separated CTs. Therefore users should check the commissioning
and the relay setting carefully to ascertain that the relay takes separated CT sources.

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 Figure 3. Risk of Combined CTs

2.4. Coordination of GSU REF Protection and Transformer Grounding

This coordination is to inhibit the misoperation of Restricted Earth Fault (REF) relay in the power
plant. Every GSU’s grounding is managed by the SO. Whether to ground or not is decided by single
line to ground fault current level or zero sequence voltage rise at the ungrounded transformer’s neutral
point. Korea’s SO adopts effective grounding system according to the IEEE standard, and the SO
regularly checks whether the effective grounding is maintained or not. And there are some GSUs
which are required to open its grounding due to excessive single line to ground fault current. Adjusting
the grounding may not harm the system stability itself, but the effect on REF function should be
considered.

Despite most digital relay manufacturers provide the secured REF function, some relays still have
chance to misoperate when the user enable this function for ungrounded transformers. The main
reason is that the only phase CTs are involved calculating trip decision regardless the grounding CT
current. Moreover in the one and half CB busbar configuration, the two high voltage CTs can make
undesirable differential or bias current by error factors. Processing the zero sequence compensation or
fundamental frequency extraction can also make this effect[4].

The solution is to add a grounding current supervision before making the trip signal like Figure 4. By
doing this the user can prevent misoperation regardless of the transformer grounding. The SO also
recommends adding a circuit which can enable or disable the REF function. When the transformer is
ungrounded, the new circuit allows the GO to disable the REF function easily. This circuit can be
implemented by a push button attached outside the relay.

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 Figure 4. Blocking REF operation for Ungrounded Transformer

2.5. Coordination of Generator Backup Distance and Transmission Line Protection

Generator Backup Distance (21G) is consisted of 2 zones. The first zone protects the generator and
low voltage side of the GSU. This zone does not see any fault behind the transformer hence there is no
major argument to use this zone. However the second zone of backup distance function protects
beyond the GSU, sometimes including the longest adjacent transmission line. In this case there should
be proper time delay coordination to have secure protection system.

If the fault occurs within the transmission network of second zone, enough time delay for this zone is
needed so that the transmission line protection functions to operate earlier. Figure 5 shows how proper
time coordination is made. Because the longest time delay of transmission protection is distance zone-
3(for example 100 cycles in Korea), the time delay of 21G zone-2 should be set to about 120 cycles. If
the fault is not cleared by any transmission protection functions, the 21G will trip the high voltage
switch yard CB after 120 cycles to terminate the fault current contribution.

2.6. Coordination of Transformer Ground Overcurrent and Other Network Protection

Transformer ground overcurrent (51G) function is originally designed for backup protection of
transformer ground fault. But this function can be also used as transmission network backup protection,
because the transformer grounding provides additional zero sequence fault current route to the external
network. Regarding this function as not critical and important, Korea’s SO used to run this function
just for an alarm. But after many ground fault experiences, the SO changed its strategy to utilize this
simple overcurrent relay. Figure 5. illustrates how this function can work as last backup protection.
When a fault occurs at location (E), the busbar protection was supposed to operate first and later
Transmission Line Distance (21) relays were supposed to operate zone-2~3. But in case both busbar
and line protection fail to operate, only the 51G can pick up against this fault. By using 51G as trip,
this function can prevent its generator from feeding the fault current. For this reason, Korea’s SO
started to use the function as backup protection for transmission network fault. However this function
can be used as trip only when proper time coordination is made. Because the longest time delay of
transmission protection is distance zone-3(100 cycles in Korea), the time delay of 51G should be
longer than that time. Considering transmission line single phase reclosing, the adequate time delay
should be at least 3 seconds.

2.7. Coordination of Directional Overcurrent and Other Network Protection

Directional Overcurrent (67) is mainly to protect the GSU feeder. And this function is designed to
operate for only forward(to the generator) direction faults. But the user should set the function
carefully because it should not operate by reverse direction faults, which can happen when the relay
has undesirable directional decision. The proper coordination is to set the instantaneous overcurrent
pickup beyond the reverse direction fault current contribution of the generator.

Directional time overcurrent should be set to operate earlier than Line Distance zone-3, for low
voltage side faults. This is because the zone-3 may overreach to the power plant internal faults. In this
case Directional overcurrent should trip first to prevent unnecessary transmission line tripping. In
Korea proper time set is 70 cycles at transformer low voltage side fault case, which is 30 cycles

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shorter than zone-3(100 cycles). And regarding the fault location (G) in Figure 5, the Line Distance
zone-2 will operate for that fault. To prevent the unnecessary transmission line tripping, the user
should set this 67 time delay to about 15 cycles, which is 5~9 cycles shorter than zone-2(20~24
cycles).

Figure 5. Various Time Coordination Methods

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2.8. Other Coordination Considerations

There are other protection functions which should be considered and coordinated. Generator Out of
Step (78) function needs to be carefully set based on stability study not to misoperate by stable power
swing. Each case the electricity centre is determined according to the network source, transformer, and
generator impedance[5]. If the electricity centre falls on the transformer or the generator, the user
should allow no time delay to prevent swing current damages. Generator Reverse Power (32) function
should also have 3 to 10 seconds time delay not to operate by stable power swing or synchronized
connection.

In some cases, the Generator Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) also contains protection functions.
In this case the functions in VAR may collide with functions in other relays. Frequently duplicating
functions are Volt per Hertz (24), Loss of Field (40), and Overvoltage (59). The users, owners, and
operators should be aware of the existence of these functions and must review the setting of each
function to make proper coordination.

3. CONCLUSION

In many cases we observe unwanted tripping or unnecessary wide area tripping due to coordination
failure or relay misoperation. Though there is no absolute answer to build up the best protection
coordination, there must be much effort to minimize undesirable relay operation risks. Korea’s SO has
studied many cases and changed conventional protection schemes like differential protections and
overcurrent protections. We believe that the overall reliability enhanced by changing to the new
schemes.

The first three coordination methods are regarding CT and/or protection function configuration. These
are based on system operator’s misoperation experience and carried out to enhance the power plant’s
protection reliability. The fourth coordination is using ground overcurrent relay as a backup protection.
This is based on system operator’s protection failure experience. Rest of coordination methods are
time scheduling. These are also important because in many cases the time interval between
transmission line distance protection and power plant overcurrent protection are not coordinated.

Finally, this paper indicates that the system operator’s administrative role is very important under
competitive electricity market environment. Usually TOs and GOs do not consider overall power
system’s protection reliability. Therefore the SO should constantly monitor and verify their protection
schemes to become more reliable and secure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1] K. Lotri-Koffi “Art of Protective Relaying or Cookbook of Protective Relaying” (42nd Annual
Western Protective Relay Conference, Spokane, Washington, United States, October 2015)
[2] R. Moxley “Voting for Improved Security – How Far is Far Enough” (42nd Annual Western
Protective Relay Conference, Spokane, Washington, United States, October 2015)
[3] J. Kang “Analysis and Solutions to Unusual Differential Relay Misoperation” (42nd Annual
Western Protective Relay Conference, Spokane, Washington, United States, October 2015)
[4] 787-3,4 Transformer Protective Relay Manual (SEL, Dec 2014, page 114)
[5] N. Fischer “Tutorial on Power Swing Blocking and Out-of-Step Tripping” (39th Annual Western
Protective Relay Conference, Spokane, Washington, United States, October 2012)