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The development of a reactive power management technique for a planning environment

University of British Columbia

A computer-aided algorithm is developed for the management of reactive power flow in an electric power system. The technique is designed to assist transmission planning engineers in establishing satisfactory base-case power flow solutions. The objective in the algorithm is to reduce real power loss in the system through control of reactive power flow, and so is different than conventional "VAr allocation" algorithms. The minimisation is performed by a specially adapted gradient search with a sub-optimal step-size, which can be simply incorporated into a standard Newton-Raphson power flow program. A special feature of this thesis is the presentation of a set of contour plots of the objective function versus various pairs of control variables. An analysis of these plots is presented, and is used to demonstrate the validity of the steepest descent minimisation technique for this problem. Comments are given on tests conducted with this technique on a typical British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority power flow simulation consisting of 245 busses and 327 branches, with 47 controllable generators and 44 controllable variable-tap transformers. The algorithm is claimed to be effective and efficient for studies of this size.

Text

2010-02-24

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/20885

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

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