Studying the Impact of Solar Photovoltaic on Transient Stability of Power Systems using Direct Methods

Abstract

The increasing penetration of inverter based renewable generation in the form of solar photo-voltaic (PV) or wind has introduced numerous operational challenges and uncertainties. Among these challenges, one of the major ones is the impact on the transient stability of the grid. On the other hand, the direct methods for transient stability assessment of power systems have also fairly evolved over the past 30 years. These set of techniques inspired from the Lyapunov's direct method provide a clear insight into the system stability changes with a changing grid. The most attractive feature of these types of techniques is the heavy reduction in the computational burden by cutting down on the simulation time. These advancements were still aimed at analyzing the stability of a non-linear autonomous dynamical system and the existing power system perfectly fits that definition. Due to the changing renewable portfolio standards, the power system is undergoing serious structural and performance alterations. The whole idea of power system stability is changing and there is a major lack of work in the field of direct methods in keeping up with these changes. This dissertation aims at employing the pre-existing direct methods as well as developing new techniques to visualize and analyze the stability of a power system with an added subset of complexities introduced by PV generation.