Feasibility of adaptive intentional islanding operation of electric utility systems with distributed generation

As the process of deregulation of the electric utility industry proceeds, the importance of power quality is increasing. A fundamental aspect of power quality is the continuity of power supply that is the absence of momentary, temporary and sustained power interruptions. In this paper a network reconfiguration strategy is proposed which allows the distribution network to separate into a certain number of autonomous islands, supplied by local distributed generation, in case of permanent fault within the grid. Intentional islanding of portions of the grid is automatically carried out with an adaptive network reconfiguration depending upon the local generation/load state at the time of outage. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.