CONSIDERATION OF STABILITY IN SYSTEM DESIGN AND OPERATION

For reliable service, a power system must remain intact and be capable of withstanding a wide variety of disturbances. Owing to economic and technical limitations, no power system can be stable for all possible disturbances or contingencies. In practice, power systems are designed and operated so as to be stable for a selected list of contingencies, normally referred to as “design contingencies”.

Experience dictates their selection. The contingencies are selected on the basis that they have a significant probability of occurrence and a sufficiently high degree of severity, given the large number of elements comprising the power system. The overall goal is to strike a balance between costs and benefits of achieving a selected level of system security.

While security is primarily a function of the physical system and its current attributes, secure operation is facilitated by:

Proper selection and deployment of preventive and emergency controls.
Assessing stability limits and operating the power system within these limits.

Security assessment has been historically conducted in an off-line operation planning environment in which stability for the near-term forecasted system conditions is exhaustively determined. The results of stability limits are loaded into look-up tables which are accessed by the operator to assess the security of a prevailing system operating condition.

In the new competitive utility environment, power systems can no longer be operated in a very structured and conservative manner; the possible types and combinations of power transfer transactions may grow enormously. The present trend is, therefore, to use online dynamic security assessment. This is feasible with today’s computer hardware and stability analysis software.

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