Remedial action scheme to improve resiliency under failures in the Central American power grid

Central America is electrically interconnected from Panama through Guatemala by a 230-kV electric power transmission line with a committed capacity among countries of 300MW. Because of its radial configuration and a set of constraints in the equipment, the network is prone to collapse in case of the occurrence of some disturbances. Generally, these disturbances occur in one of the interconnected countries and drag the whole Central American system to regional failures. For this reason, the implementation of regional protection systems that avoid a power grid collapse is necessary. Hence, in this work, the implementation and simulation results of a Remedial Action Scheme is shown, which considers the main constraints in the Central American electric power grid for a certain season. It is proven that the implementation of this regional protection will increase network resiliency under failures that could cause regional blackouts. Four study cases, which show the improvement of the Central American power grid performance, are shown.