Coordination of Voltage Protection Settings Within Inverter-Based Resource

A typical inverter-based resources (IBR), i.e., solar, wind, battery energy storage, or combination of such, consists of many IBR units (inverters, wind turbine generators, etc.) connected at various places on the collector system of the plant. The IBR units are typically equipped with voltage-based protection to trip IBR units for abnormal condition (fault on a collector system, islanding, etc.). The industry ride-through standards for IBRs, such as IEEE Std 2800-2022, NERC Reliability Standard PRC-029, etc., specify the voltage ride-through requirements (voltage thresholds and respective time durations) at the high-side terminals of the main power transformer (MPT). To correctly set voltage protection on IBR unit terminals, it is necessary to calculate voltage drop/rise across the collector system to ensure that voltage protection applied at the IBR unit terminals will not limit the ability of IBR to meet voltage ride-through requirements specified at the high-side terminals of the MPT. This paper provides few examples detailing how to coordinate voltage protection settings within the IBR, considering various modeling approaches, plant operating scenarios, etc. Methods presented in this paper could be used by practicing engineers to show compliance with regulatory standards.