Under-impedance load shedding: a new preventive action against voltage instability

Load dynamics play an important role in the voltage stability. Grid-side short-circuit faults may induce severe voltage drops at motor load buses. Once the fault is cleared, depending upon its clearing time, the load bus voltage may either return to its permissible range or degrade gradually until it collapses. From the short-term voltage stability viewpoint, the former is a stable phenomenon, while the latter is an unstable circumstance and the load should be shed in order to prevent voltage instability from being spread over the grid. To cope with this problem, this study presents a new under-impedance load shedding (UILS) scheme. A quadratic distance relay is used as the load shedding element. The trajectory of load impedance is monitored by the proposed UILS relay. Following the grid-side fault clearance, if the impedance trajectory enters the load shedding zone and remains inside it for a predefined time, voltage instability is detected and the load is curtailed by the UILS relay. The proposed approach is tested on various networks, including a real power system model. The obtained results approve the efficiency of the proposed UILS scheme.