Practical methods for transfer limit analysis in the power industry deregulated environment

The rapid deregulation of the U.S. power industry and the exploding number of bilateral transactions between control areas has necessitated the development of new tools and methods calculating and updating available transfer capability (ATC). ATC values must be rapidly updated for new capacity reservations, schedules or transactions. There is a strong demand to improve the uncertainty analysis of the ATC limits for a number of varying factors, including uncertainties in the location of the delivery and receiving points. New tools are required to compute capacity benefits and transmission reliability margins. This paper describes some of the novel practical methods for ATC sensitivity and uncertainty analysis that have been recently developed by the authors and have been used by numerous utilities in the U.S. on large scale load flow cases with over 30,000 buses representing the entire Eastern interconnection.