A Tool for Analysis of Existence of Equilibria and Voltage Stability in Power Systems With Constant Power Loads

Abstract

It is well known that constant power loads in power systems have a destabilizing effect. Their growing presence in modern installations significantly aggravates this issue, hence, motivating the development of new methods to analyze their effect in ac and dc power systems. Formally, this problem can be cast as the analysis of solutions of a set of nonlinear algebraic equations of the form $f(x)=0$ , where $f:\mathbb {R}^n \rightarrow \mathbb {R}^n$ , to which we associate the differential equation $\dot{x}=f(x)$ . By invoking advanced concepts of dynamical systems theory and effectively exploiting its monotonicity, the following properties are established: First, prove that, if there are equilibria, there is a distinguished one that is stable and attractive, and give conditions such that it is unique. Second, give a simple online procedure to decide whether equilibria exist or not and to compute the distinguished one. Third, prove that the method is also applicable for the case when the parameters of the system are not exactly known. It is shown how the proposed tool can be applied to the analysis of long-term voltage stability in ac power systems, and to the study of existence of equilibria of multiterminal high-voltage dc systems and dc microgrids.