A Detailed Presentation of an Innovative Local and Wide-Area Special Protection Scheme to Avoid Voltage Collapse: From Proof of Concept to Grid Implementation

For more than a decade, Hydro-Québec Research Institute (IREQ) has been involved in different strategic research and development activities to maintain the stability and security of the Hydro-Québec network. An innovative project, so-called global and local control of compensators (GLCC), was initiated for wide-area and local control of dynamic shunt compensators such as static VAR compensators and synchronous condensers to increase its transfer capacity. The objective of the GLCC project is the development of a new special protection scheme (SPS) to maintain voltage stability after events resulting in large voltage drop using local and wide-area network measurements based on telecommunications and phasor measurement units. The core of the GLCC special protection scheme is the substation control unit (SCU) which includes all the intelligence of the whole GLCC control system. This paper presents the details of the functions of the SCU controller which has been designed, developed, and intensively tested by Hydro-Québec with a dedicated replica at IREQ power system simulation laboratory. Results of both hardware-in-the-loop real-time simulations and field tests showed the reliability, robustness and security of the SCU controller. On that basis, a deployment on Hydro-Québec network started to implement the GLCC SPS solution at all shunt compensator substations.