Safety and Its Importance in Protective Relaying
(Room Windsor Complex)
28 Feb 18
2:30 PM
-
3:00 PM
Tracks:
Electrical Safety
Often emphasis is placed first on economics however safety is always of the utmost importance since we are working in a high voltage power system that is a hazardous environment. Being safe is a state of mind and closely following a good set of well-established practices; it is necessary to always maintain this state of mind. You must fully understand these practices and be extremely well versed in them. Unsafe practices can result in the loss of revenue and more importantly human life. The purpose of this article is twofold: • Good practices as related to protective relaying such as end-to-end communication assisted tripping scheme testing and offsite testing • Bad practices These practices are applied to the field, interdisciplinary, office and at the enterprise level. Examples are given for field personnel responsible for testing, design engineers and upper level management at the enterprise level. Unsafe practices or the lack of good practices invariably leads to relay misoperations or the lack of a critical relay operation when required and called upon to operate. The advice presented here is based upon real life experience such as acceptance testing generator protection at a nuclear power plant that follows a highly regimented set of practices that are periodically reviewed and constantly improved over time. Another example given is how to properly implement programmable relay logic, which should first be tested in a laboratory environment by the designers.