Tracking the Transient Source Location Associated with Electric Utility Shunt Capacitor Switching

Abstract

This paper presents a simple approach for tracking the actual location of transient sources generated by the electric utility switched capacitor banks with a limited number of power quality meters installed at pre-selected network buses. The approach is based on the voltage-disturbance energy variations at the measured buses and phase angle changes of the connected branch current due to reactive power supplied by the switched-on utility capacitor. The proposed transient-source tracking procedure is firstly to calculate measured energy change during the occurrence of capacitor switching. Then the phase angle variations of connected branch currents to the measured bus are recorded. Both measured energy and phase angle variations are used to identify the location of the switched capacitor through an efficient tracking algorithm. The proposed method is tested with both radial and meshed power systems. Results show that the approach is simple and computationally efficient