Distance Relay: Operates based on impedance, commonly used in transmission line protection. Earth Fault Relay: Detects leakage currents to the ground. What controls it: Relay performance depends on the protected zone, CT/PT inputs, pickup settings, time delay, breaker clearing time, trip. Protective Relay Definition: A protective relay is an automatic device that senses abnormal conditions in electrical circuits and triggers actions to isolate faults. : 4 The first protective relays were electromagnetic. Selectivity is a mandatory requirement for all protection, but the importance of it depends on the application. For example, unselective protection operation during a medium voltage network fault will cause an outage for an unnecessarily large number of consumers. While this is bad, It's not a.