Voltage control in heavily loaded networks

Abstract

This paper presents a method to determine whether an operative voltage control action will have the steady-state expected effect or not. Sensitivity indexes are designed to correlate the controlled voltage with the controlling physical variable in generators, synchronous and static compensators, LTCs and shunt capacitors/reactors. An illustrative numerical example is provided as well as a real life one. The heavily loaded Brazilian system was operating without any problem. However, a small increase in generation caused voltage control devices to work unexpectedly. A harmful interaction among nearby control devices was also noticed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.