Wide-area monitoring and control of future smart grids

Application of wide-area monitoring and control for future smart grids with substantial wind penetration and advanced network control options through FACTS and HVDC (both point-to-point and multi-terminal) is the subject matter of this thesis. For wide-area monitoring, a novel technique is proposed to characterize the system dynamic response in near real-time in terms of not only damping and frequency but also mode-shape, the latter being critical for corrective control action. Real-time simulation in Opal-RT is carried out to illustrate the effectiveness and practical feasibility of the proposed approach. Potential problem with wide-area closed-loop continuous control using FACTS devices due to continuously time-varying latency is addressed through the proposed modification of the traditional phasor POD concept introduced by ABB. Adverse impact of limited bandwidth availability due to networked communication is established and a solution using an observer at the PMU location has been demonstrated. Impact of wind penetration on the system dynamic performance has been analyzed along with effectiveness of damping control through proper coordination of wind farms and HVDC links. For multi-terminal HVDC (MTDC) grids the critical issue of autonomous power sharing among the converter stations following a contingency (e.g. converter outage) is addressed. Use of a power-voltage droop in the DC link voltage control loops using remote voltage feedback is shown to yield proper distribution of power mismatch according to the converter ratings while use of local voltages turns out to be unsatisfactory. A novel scheme for adapting the droop coefficients to share the burden according to the available headroom of each converter station is also studied. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is illustrated through detailed frequency domain analysis and extensive time-domain simulation results on different test systems

Electromechanical Dynamics of High Photovoltaic Power Grids

This dissertation study focuses on the impact of high PV penetration on power grid electromechanical dynamics. Several major aspects of power grid electromechanical dynamics are studied under high PV penetration, including frequency response and control, inter-area oscillations, transient rotor angle stability and electromechanical wave propagation.To obtain dynamic models that can reasonably represent future power systems, Chapter One studies the co-optimization of generation and transmission with large-scale wind and solar. The stochastic nature of renewables is considered in the formulation of mixed-integer programming model. Chapter Two presents the development procedures of high PV model and investigates the impact of high PV penetration on frequency responses. Chapter Three studies the impact of PV penetration on inter-area oscillations of the U.S. Eastern Interconnection system. Chapter Four presents the impacts of high PV on other electromechanical dynamic issues, including transient rotor angle stability and electromechanical wave propagation. Chapter Five investigates the frequency response enhancement by conventional resources. Chapter Six explores system frequency response improvement through real power control of wind and PV. For improving situation awareness and frequency control, Chapter Seven studies disturbance location determination based on electromechanical wave propagation. In addition, a new method is developed to generate the electromechanical wave propagation speed map, which is useful to detect system inertia distribution change. Chapter Eight provides a review on power grid data architectures for monitoring and controlling power grids. Challenges and essential elements of data architecture are analyzed to identify various requirements for operating high-renewable power grids and a conceptual data architecture is proposed. Conclusions of this dissertation study are given in Chapter Nine

A wide area system for power transmission security enhancement using a process systems approach

Imperial Users onl

Resonance impact on inter-area oscillations of the Nordic power system

Maintaining the robustness and stability of the Nordic power systemis an essential task nowadays. The Nordic electricity network has the characteristics of bearing heavy generation in the northern region while supplying large consumption in the southern region through longtransmission lines. Therefore, its operation mightbecomemore complex which infact can lead to operational issues that did not exist in the pastand might lead to major problemsofthe network.The resonance interaction caused by forcing oscillations occurring at frequencies near the inter-area mode frequenciesis such an issue and is studied thoroughly in this thesis project.Small signal stability analysis is the basis for the research of this phenomenon, as the inter-area modes need to be calculated. For verifying this phenomenon, simulations were implemented in DigSilent PowerFactory software. The Nordic 32 test model is utilized, as it reflectsthe original Nordic system. Initially, the modes of the system are calculated,and the inter-area modes of interest are identifiedbased on their frequency and damping ratio value. The observability, controllability and participation factorsof the modes areconsidered for picking the modes of interestfor further analysis. Then, forced oscillations in the formof load variations are implemented to study the resonance impact withthe inter-area modes. As a mean to quantify the resonance impact, the active power flow of tie lines in the system is used.A sensitivity study was performed to study how various factors of the forced oscillations influence the resonance impact. The sensitivity study considered the following aspects of the forced oscillations: frequency, amplitude, location, and type. The amplification of the resulting oscillations seems to be affected by the value of controllability of the mode whose frequency couples with the inter-area frequency. This connection is evaluated in the simulations of this project and interesting results occur for further analysi

DEEP LEARNING BASED POWER SYSTEM STABILITY ASSESSMENT FOR REDUCED WECC SYSTEM

Power system stability is the ability of power system, for a giving initial operating condition, to reach a new operation condition with most of the system variables bounded in normal range after subjecting to a short or long disturbance. Traditional power system stability mainly uses time-domain simulation which is very time consuming and only appropriate for offline assessment. Nowadays, with increasing penetration of inverter based renewable, large-scale distributed energy storage integration and operation uncertainty brought by weather and electricity market, system dynamic and operating condition is more dramatic, and traditional power system stability assessment based on scheduling may not be able to cover all the real-time dispatch scenarios, also online assessment and self-awareness for modern power system becomes more and more important and urgent for power system dynamic security. With the development of fast computation resources and more available online dataset, machine learning techniques have been developed and applied to many areas recently and could potentially applied to power system application. In this dissertation, a deep learning-based power system stability assessment is proposed. Its accurate and fast assessment for power system dynamic security is useful in many places, including day-ahead scheduling, real-time operation, and long-term planning. The simplified Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) 240-bus system with renewable penetration up to 49.2% is used as the study system. The dataset generation, model training and error analysis are demonstrated, and the results show that the proposed deep learning-based method can accurately and fast predict the power system stability. Compared with traditional time simulation method, its near millisecond prediction makes the online assessment and self-awareness possible in future power system application