Synopsis of Phasor Monitoring Applications for Wide Area Control and Protection

Abstract

The phenomenon of voltage collapse in electric power systems has received a considerable amount of attention in the last decade. Although the occurrences of the voltage blackouts have decreased in the recent years, the problem of voltage stability still poses a considerable threat to the security and the reliability of modern electricity grids. The ultimate objective of this thesis is to further investigate and expand upon the existing body of knowledge on the voltage collapse phenomenon and develop protection and control schemes for mitigating such undesirable events in modern electric grids. In doing so, the research done in this thesis work builds on an earlier work done in the area of Voltage Instability Prediction (VIP). Although proven to be a successful metric in determining the proximity of large nonlinear systems to a potential voltage instability event, much remains to be explored in the area of Voltage Instability Prediction. In particular the issues of estimating the static stability margins, the locational dependence of accuracy of such VIP derived margins, the exploitation of redundant local measurements and a compelling argument in favor of combining/fusing the individual VIP margins into a single system-wide measure of voltage collapse margin form the main focus of investigation of this work. To lower the individual entropy of the VIP derived margins, a data fusion algorithm built on the foundations of Dempster-Shafer’s evidential reasoning method is proposed. The research is concluded on a positive note with the final results further pushing the envelope of knowledge in the field of voltage stability studies in power systems.