Synchrophasor-Based Emergency Generation Control for Area Balancing

Abstract

In North America, balancing authority (BA) maintains the demand-supply balance and frequency stability within its responsible area. In case of an emergency, such as loss of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), automatic generation control (AGC), state estimation and energy management system (EMS), system operators lose the automatic monitoring and control capability, as a result of which they have to manually dispatch units to maintain area balancing. This could be inefficient and at the risk of failure to comply with NERC’s balancing control performance standards. We propose an emergency control strategy to help BA balance the system cost-effectively based on the independent synchrophasor infrastructure in the event of SCADA/EMS failure. Depending on the availability of electronic dispatch network, the proposed emergency control decides if a synchrophasor-based AGC-like function should be performed every 4 s to regulate area control error. It also executes economic dispatch on a 5-min basis by solving the desired dispatch point of units with PMU installed through a linear programming problem to meet forecasted load change in 5 min. Closed-loop simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme is able to successfully balance the system at a lower cost to fulfill the BA’s obligations under emergency operation conditions.