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General Information
- Description
A world full of energy needs efficient network management
Whether in bustling cities or developing regions, prosperity and progress in our modern society are inconceivable without energy. Energy is the driving force and lifeline of our civilization – in households as much as in industry, transportation or healthcare.
One of the greatest challenges of the 21st century is to supply the required energy efficiently, economically, and with minimal impact on the environment – a challenge that involves the entire chain of energy logistics from generation to transportation and distribution.
These efforts will be affected by four major factors in the coming decades: worldwide growth in energy demand, increasing urbanization, dwindling fossil energy resources, and the effects of climate change.
What needs to be done? And not just today, but in the future?
Power network operators around the globe are investing knowledge and capital to meet these new challenges. Success will depend on a number of factors, including optimized utilization of existing resources and networks, further expansion of infrastructures, and integration of decentralized and regenerative energy production with renewables.
Energy automation plays an important role in this increasingly complex landscape. It facilitates improved energy management, more flexible responses to changing demands, and increased efficiency throughout the networks – all of which ensures a high level of energy reliability at reduced cost.
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QuickStab
- Description
- Details
- Benefits
How can I fight blackout before it happens?
With QuickStab - a system-wide voltage and steady-state stability index calculation
The ability to transfer energy across AC networks is hampered by thermal, voltage and stability limits. The maximum loadability of a transmission system is the state where voltages collapse and units may get out of synchronism, and is a severe constraint.
The distance from a given operating point to the state of maximum loadability is called stability reserve. It changes when the system state has changed, and may be quite different from values computed offline. Its recalculation after each state estimate and load-flow is required because operating the system near its stability limit may lead to blackouts. This problem is solved rapidly by QuickStab®.
Given a load-flow solution or state estimate of a multi-area power system, QuickStab®:
- computes for each area the maximum loadability and the safe system loading for a user-defined security margin
- Performs the full range of voltage and steady-state stability computations for contingency scenarios
- Identifies generators that may cause instability and ranks the machines and tie-line injections in order of their impact on system’s stability
QuickStab® can be used
- as a stand-alone offline application, invoked from, or used in conjunction with, load-flow programs such as Siemens PSS/E, and
- seamlessly or loosely integrated with real-time network analysis applications of SCADA/EMS such as Siemens Spectrum Power
INPUT DATA
The input data required by QuickStab® include the following:
- State estimation solution or solved power-flow case
- Transient and synchronous reactances of the generators and synchronous condensers; reactances of the step-up transformers
- P-Q Capability Curves of the generators
The input base-case can be supplied in industry-standard formats including:
- Siemens Power Technologies Inc. (PTI)’s PSS/E format
- IEEE Common Exchange Format
PROCESS
Starting from a solved multi-area power-flow base case, the voltage / steady-state stability analysis performed by QuickStab® encompasses the following major steps:
- Extract a sub-area, or a combination of sub-areas, from the overall network and build the appropriate interface model at the interconnection buses
- Evaluate the reactive power criterion stability index for the system, the sub-area, or the combination of sub-areas specified by the user
- Determine the stability reserve,
- Compute both the total system MW loading and the MW schedule for each generator and tie-line import for a state that would correspond to the security margin
- Compute an ideal MW dispatch which would maximize the steady-state stability reserve
- Rank the generating units, synchronous condensers and tie-lines in the order of their impact on stability, i.e. the risk of causing steady-state instability
The elapsed time for running QuickStab is less than, or equal to, one (1) second when performing system-wide voltage and steady-state stability calculations for a power system network comprising about 2,000 buses on a regular PC.
QuickStab quantifies the risk of blackout, is extremely fast, can help develop preventative and corrective strategies, and makes extensive use of intuitive graphics.
The ability to quickly assess the distance to instability and the impact of generators on stability is paramount for fast and reliable decision-making and it helps the Transmission System Operator (TSO) to:
- Enhance the system’s operating reliability by maintaining a safe distance to the transmission network’s stability limit where voltages may collapse and units may get out of synchronism
- Facilitate the implementation of market-based operating decisions, such as energy and demand transactions across large interconnected networks, without risk of blackout
- Develop profitable strategies by supplying more load, selling more energy and/or wheeling more power without having to add new transmission facilities
- Enhance congestion management procedures and develop remedial action strategies by shifting generation in order to maximize the distance to the power system’s stability limit
The program’s capability to setup and assess multi-area what-if scenarios is another useful and quite unique benefit. Knowledge is power – and the ability to quickly determine the actual transfer limits of each and any sub-area of the transmission system will offer the TSO a strategic edge in the extremely competitive electricity market.