WAMS based self-tuning FACTS controllers for improved utilisation of existing power transmission assets

Completed

Other Power and Storage Technologies(Electricity transmission and distribution)

Basic and strategic applied research

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Dr B Chaudhuri
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Imperial College London

Standard

EPSRC

03 July 2008

02 July 2011

36 months

£256,653

Electrical engineering

London

Energy : Engineering

Dr B Chaudhuri, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London

Project Contact, ABB Group (International), Switzerland
Project Contact, National Grid plc
Project Contact, Statnett, Norway

With increasing opposition to building new transmission lines, transfer of bulk energy is going to be a major challenge in the UK and in many parts of Europe. Examples include the transmission link from the north of the UK to the load centres in the south and the corridor importing hydro power from north of Norway to the load centres near Oslo. It is therefore, absolutely critical that the existing power transmission assets are fully utilised by loading them much closer to their capacity. To ensure secure operation under such heavy loading, the dynamic performance of the system needs to be improved through appropriate control of voltage and power flow using the flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS) devices. It is often difficult to obtain accurate information about all the components (e.g. loads) of a power system which poses fundamental limitation on conventional model based control design. In the above context, this project aims at designing and validating a self-tuning control scheme for FACTS devices that rely solely on the measured signals and thereby, obviate the need for accurate system information. Such controllers are designed independent of the system operating condition and therefore, need no retuning with changes in system configuration. Use of more than one feedback signals from strategic locations, available though wide-area measurement systems (WAMS), can potentially improve the effectiveness of the FACTS controller. Hence, the control design needs tobe formulated in a multi-variable framework. The performance of the controller would be validated in real-time through hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulation employing a test bench, emulating the behaviour of large power systems, and a commercial control simulator. The proposed project essentially integrates FACTS with WAMS and could potentially provide the developers and user of both these technologies a new edge

11/01/08