Dynamic Power System Load -Estimation of Parameters from Operational Data

The significance of load modeling for voltage stability studies has been emphasized by several disturbances, which have taken place in the past years. They have shown that the loads in combination with other dynamics are among the main contributors of prolonged low voltage conditions, voltage instability and collapse in the power system. As a result of these disturbances new investigations have come up to better understand the nature of the load. However, power system loads keep being very difficult to model; the load generally aggregates a large number of individual components of different nature, different load dynamics are excited depending on the time frame of actuation and the type of disturbance affecting the system, and the load is highly dependent on external factors such as weather conditions. This thesis investigates the load-voltage characteristic during two different time scales, long-term over several minutes, and short-term covering ms to several seconds, for different sized disturbances, and its impact on the calculation of transfer limits and security margins in voltage stability studies. The accurate determination of transfer limits will be an increasingly important task to maintain the operational security and economic dispatch of the power system. The location of the stability limits and the determination of transfer limits depend on the load-voltage characteristic since load relief due to the load-voltage dependency results in larger transfer limits. Moreover, the importance of using dynamic load models instead of static ones in stability studies is highlighted in this thesis. Due to the large amount of electrical heating loads in Sweden and its effect on voltage stability, a dynamic load model with exponential recovery, previously proposed by Hill and Karlsson, [Karlsson and Hill, 1994], has been the starting point for the investigations. Field measurements from continuous normal operation at the 20 kV-level from a substation in Sweden have provided a large amount of data covering all seasons during the time period July 2001-June 2002, and have resulted in extensive, unique and interesting recordings of active and reactive load characteristic and its dependency with small voltage variations. The data have revealed the variation of the load parameters and their dependency with weather and season of the year. The work has also contributed to a better approach for the normalization of traditional reactive load models. Furthermore the load-voltage characteristic during large disturbances has been investigated based on field measurements of phase-to-phase faults in a non-effectively earthed 50 kV system in Sweden. Three-phase currents and voltages have been used to estimate the active and reactive power. The recordings exhibited voltage dips up to 30% in the positive sequence voltage. The severity of the disturbances accentuates the nonlinear behavior of the load; the active and reactive power rapidly increase after fault clearing to levels even above the pre-disturbance value due to the re-acceleration of motors. The full recovery of the voltage is delayed due to the re-connection of tripped load. Moreover, it is shown that traditional load models do not accurately reflect the load behavior during these disturbances, for voltage dips around 12 % or larger due to the nonlinearities. An alternative load model, which represents the nonlinearities, has been tested. The superior behavior is demonstrated with the field measurements. Finally, some guidelines for industry to better account for the load in future stability studies have been included as a corollary of this thesis. (Less)