The changing utility environment characterized with system congestion, increased sensitivity of industrial loads to short circuit faults and other abnormal system conditions leads to the requirements for fast fault clearing and stable behavior of protection relays during wide area system disturbances. Advanced protection functions based on the monitoring of the transient voltage and current signals at the relay location need proper simulation tools for the calculation of their settings and the testing of their performance for a specific application. That is why proper understanding of electromagnetic transient simulation of the behavior of the electric power system is essential for the improvement of the stability of the system.

The authors of the book – N. Watson and J. Amillaga (both from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand) understand the growing complexity of the topic and its importance in the design of electric power systems, as well as the need for a consistent treatment of the computer analysis of electromagnetic transient programs.

This is delivered as a hard cover book of more than four hundred pages. The material is divided in thirteen chapters, followed by eight appendices.

The authors star t with definitions, objectives and background, followed by discussions on the analysis of continuous and discrete systems, as well as state variable analysis. Chapters covering the modeling of transmission lines, cables, transformers, rotating machines and power electronics provide a lot of information that can help the reader not only understand the concepts, but also the data that needs to be available in order to model the power system.

Modeling of protection and control systems ads another layer to the simulation of the behavior of the electric power system during abnormal conditions that allows the transition from one state to another based on the operation of the different secondary devices. The book not only provides a thorough review of concepts and models, but helps the reader understand them through many examples. MATLAB and FORTRAN code examples are included in the appendices at the end of the book.

This book will be of particular value to practicing protection, automation and control specialists, as well as advanced engineering students or anybody else with interests in engineering or testing of protection and control systems.

Each chapter offers detailed discussions of the different aspects of the subject, as well as examples, problems and references.

The recent blackouts in different countries around the world demonstrated the impact of protection on wide area disturbances.

Chapter 10 covers power system phenomena and relaying considerations and can be very helpful in understanding the dynamic behavior of the electric power system, steady-state, transient and voltage stability, the impact of independent power producers and islanding.

Chapter 11 then focuses on some advanced protection topics related to the protection of the electric power system - system integrity protection schemes, underfrequency and undervoltage load shedding, out-of-step relaying and adaptive protection. Hidden failures and the impact of distance relay polarizing are also discussed.

The last two chapters of the book cover a range of protection related issues, such as breaker failure, reclosing and single-phase operation, relay setting and testing, as well as operation analysis.

Discussions on fault location, oscillography analysis, COMTRADE and synchrophasor standards are included in the last chapter.