Assessing Reactive Power Reserves With Respect to Operating Constraints and Voltage Stability

This paper proposes a two-step approach to evaluate reactive power reserves with respect to operating constraints and voltage stability for a set of postulated operating scenarios. The first step determines the minimum overall needed reactive power reserves of generators such that the system withstands, from a static viewpoint, any postulated scenario. This problem is formulated as a security constrained optimal power flow (SCOPF) which includes operating constraints relative to all postulated scenarios. Particular attention is paid to the techniques aimed to reduce the large size of the SCOPF problem. The second step determines additional reserves to ensure voltage stability of scenarios for which, when modeling dynamic system behavior, the reserves obtained by SCOPF are insufficient. These reserves are computed using a heuristic technique which relies on dynamic simulation. Numerical results on four test systems of 60, 118, 618, and 1203 buses support the interest of the approach.