RfG & P1547 Regulations are Changing
With an ever increasing dependency on renewable energies, the Distribution Network Organisations are taking positive measures to maintain grid stability.
Renewables, by their very nature are much more variable than their fossil fuel counterparts as they depend on weather or climatic conditions, which change. So looking to the future and the requirement for increased use of renewable energy, set against the need for maintaining network stability and reliability, has led the regulatory bodies within Europe and the USA to review and revise their technical standards for grid connected applications,
Current regulations are aimed at immediate disconnection of the appliance on detecting a network fault to avoid the possibility of unintentional islanding, but this is now found to be exacerbating stability issues, as DERs (distributed energy resources) have increased significantly in numbers and their sudden removal from the network no longer goes unnoticed. The new standard and referencing regulations are expected to be rolled out from early 2018[JR1] , and will instead be aimed at keeping appliances connected through voltage and frequency dips caused by bulk system faults, unless a genuine unintentional island at distribution level occurs.
In addition to this, connected appliances will be expected to actively respond to changes on the grid meaning the application can be called upon to automatically export more or less power, supporting grid stability.
Genset systems that parallel with the grid, along with other connected applications, will soon need to comply with the new regulations and there are control modules appearing on the market to help.
DSE’s 8610MKII Auto Start and Synchronising genset control module has recently had some additional features designed into the product to meet the new RfG and P1547 regulations moving forward. Power and var outputs are designed to be variable depending on frequency and voltage, and when in parallel with the mains new power modes provide the ability to affect the local mains voltage by changing the amount of kvar produced. Other [JR2] new features of the module include the facility to ‘hot swap’ a redundant MSC link, true manual breaker control, alarms to detect water in the fuel & fuel in the bund tank and sophisticated configurable ‘ramp up’ and ‘ramp down’ rates.
