Abstract:
The most common practice to prevent power system instabilities is with local generator out-of-step protection. Unfortunately, out-of-step protection operation of generators may not be fast enough, and an instability may take down nearby generators and the rest of the power system by the time the local generator relay operates. Hence, it is important to assess power system stability over transmission lines as soon as the transient instability is detected instead of relying on purely localized out-of-step protection in generators.
This presentation would discuss a synchrophasor-based out-of-step prediction methodology at the transmission line level using wide area measurements from optimal phasor measurement unit (PMU) locations in an interconnected system. The proposed scheme was used to predict the first swing out-of-step condition in a Western Systems Coordinating Council (WSCC) 9 bus power system. A coherency analysis was first performed in this multi-machine system to determine the two coherent groups of generators. The coherent generator groups were then represented with a two-machine equivalent system, and the synchrophasor-based out-of-step prediction algorithm then applied to the reduced equivalent system. The coherency among the group of generators was determined within 100 ms for the contingency scenarios tested. The proposed technique is able to predict the instability 141.66 to 408.33 ms before the system actually reaches out-of-step conditions.
Electromagnetic transient simulations with a real-time digital simulator (RTDS) were used to test the accuracy of the proposed algorithm with respect to predicting transient instability conditions. The studies show that the proposed method is computationally efficient and accurate for larger power systems. The proposed method was also implemented with actual PMU measurements from a relay (General Electric (GE) N60 relay). The testing was carried out with an interface between the N60 relay and the RTDS. The WSCC 9 bus system was modeled in the simulator and the analog time signals from the optimal location in the network communicated to the N60 relay. The synchrophasor data from the PMUs in the N60 were used to back-calculate the rotor angles of the generators in the system. Once the coherency was established, the swing curves for the coherent group of generators were found from time series prediction (autoregressive integrated (ARI) model). The test results with the actual PMUs match quite well with the results obtained from virtual PMU-based testing in the RTDS. The calculation times for the time series prediction are also very small.
Ramakrishna (Rama) Gokaraju, University of Saskatchewan