Magnetically controllable reactor based multi-FACTS coordination control strategy

Abstract

Traditional devices in flexible AC transmission system (FACTS) like magnetically controllable reactor (MCR), and fixed capacitors (FC) are less expensive and have medium or low response speed that can only provide excessive inductive or capacitive reactive power compensation. However, modern FACTS devices like static var compensators (SVC) are expensive and have high response speed which can provide limited inductive to capacitive reactive power compensation as compared to the MCR and FC. In addition, if there is no proper coordination between these traditional and modern FACTS devices they absorb each other's reactive power and may results in the decrease of compensation margin and wastage of the resources. Therefore, to make an effective use of these categories of FACTS devices in the existing power system, the coordination control that shares high speed and excessive compensation ability without wastage of resources is essential. This paper presents coordinated control of multi-FACTS devices to provide efficient reactive power compensation based voltage regulation. At first, the characteristics of various categorical FACTS devices are presented in relation to response speed by incorporating high speed response FACTS (HSRF), medium speed response FACTS (MSRF) and low speed response compensator (LSRC). Finally, the MCR with SVC and MCR with FC coordination controls have been developed sequentially with minimal efforts of compatibility issues and compensation speed while ensuring an increase in the reactive power reserves for the SVC. The simulation is carried out on PSCAD/EMTDC to test the coordination control efficiency of several three phase multi-FACTS devices with series and parallel configurations and validated on a modified IEEE 30 bus power system. The results show that multi-FACTS coordination control increases the SVC reserves and is promising in providing voltage regulation for the power system under various scenarios.