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Power systems are undergoing a significant transformation as a result of the retirements of conventional coal-fired generation units and the increasing integration of converter interfaced renewable resources. The instantaneous renewable generation penetration as a percentage of the load served in megawatt (MW), in some areas of the United States (U.S.) sometimes approaches over 50 percent. These changes have introduced new challenges for reliability studies considering the two functional reliability aspects, i.e., adequacy and the dynamic security or operating reliability. Adequacy assessment becomes more complex due to the variability introduced by renewable energy generation. The traditionally used reserve margin only considers …

Contributors

Wang, Yingying, Vittal, Vijay, Khorsand, Mojdeh, et al.

Created Date

2020

Reliable and secure operation of bulk power transmission system components is an important aspect of electric power engineering. Component failures in a transmission network can lead to serious consequences and impact system reliability. The operational health of the transmission assets plays a crucial role in determining the reliability of an electric grid. To achieve this goal, scheduled maintenance of bulk power system components is an important activity to secure the transmission system against unanticipated events. This thesis identifies critical transmission elements in a 500 kV transmission network utilizing a ranking strategy. The impact of the failure of transmission assets operated …

Contributors

Bhandari, Harsh Nandlal, Vittal, Vijay, Heydt, Gerald T, et al.

Created Date

2019

Distributed energy resources have experienced dramatic growth and are beginning to support a significant amount of customer loads. Power electronic converters are the primary interface between the grid and the distributed energy resources/storage and offer several advantages including fast control, flexibility and high efficiency. The efficiency and the power density by volume are important performance metrics of a power converter. Compact and high efficiency power converter is beneficial to the cost-effectiveness of the converter interfaced generations. In this thesis, a soft-switching technique is proposed to reduce the size of passive components in a grid-connected converter while maintaining a high power …

Contributors

Yu, Ziwei, Ayyanar, Raja, Vittal, Vijay, et al.

Created Date

2018

Until late 1970’s the primary focus in power system modeling has been largely directed towards power system generation and transmission. Over the years, the importance of load modeling grew and having an accurate representation of load played an important role in the planning and operation studies. With an emphasis on tackling the topic of load modeling, this thesis presents the following intermediary steps in developing accurate load models: 1. Synthesis of a three-phase standard feeder and load model using the measured voltages and currents, for events such as faults and feeder pickup cases, obtained at the head of the feeder. …

Contributors

Nekkalapu, Sameer, Vittal, Vijay, Undrill, John M, et al.

Created Date

2018

After a major disturbance, the power system response is highly dependent on protection schemes and system dynamics. Improving power systems situational awareness requires proper and simultaneous modeling of both protection schemes and dynamic characteristics in power systems analysis tools. Historical information and ex-post analysis of blackouts reaffirm the critical role of protective devices in cascading events, thereby confirming the necessity to represent protective functions in transient stability studies. This dissertation is aimed at studying the importance of representing protective relays in power system dynamic studies. Although modeling all of the protective relays within transient stability studies may result in a …

Contributors

Hedman, Mojdeh Khorsand, Vittal, Vijay, Ayyanar, Raja, et al.

Created Date

2017

The power system is the largest man-made physical network in the world. Performing analysis of a large bulk system is computationally complex, especially when the study involves engineering, economic and environmental considerations. For instance, running a unit-commitment (UC) over a large system involves a huge number of constraints and integer variables. One way to reduce the computational expense is to perform the analysis on a small equivalent (reduced) model instead on the original (full) model. The research reported here focuses on improving the network reduction methods so that the calculated results obtained from the reduced model better approximate the performance …

Contributors

Zhu, Yujia, Tylavsky, Daniel John, Vittal, Vijay, et al.

Created Date

2017

Alternate sources of energy such as wind, solar photovoltaic and fuel cells are coupled to the power grid with the help of solid state converters. Continued deregulation of the power sector coupled with favorable government incentives has resulted in the rapid growth of renewable energy sources connected to the distribution system at a voltage level of 34.5kV or below. Of late, many utilities are also investing in these alternate sources of energy with the point of interconnection with the power grid being at the transmission level. These converter interfaced generation along with their associated control have the ability to provide …

Contributors

Ramasubramanian, Deepak, Vittal, Vijay, Undrill, John, et al.

Created Date

2017

Electric power system security assessment is one of the most important requirements for operational and resource planning of the bulk power system ensuring safe operation of the power system for all credible contingencies. This deterministic approach usually provides a conservative criterion and can result in expensive bulk system expansion plans or conservative operating limits. Furthermore, with increased penetration of converter-based renewable generation in the electric grid, the dynamics of the grid are changing. In addition, the variability and intermittency associated with the renewable energy sources introduce uncertainty in the electricity grid. Since security margins have direct economic impact on the …

Contributors

Datta, Sohom, Vittal, Vijay, Undrill, John, et al.

Created Date

2017

Two significant trends of recent power system evolution are: (1) increasing installa-tion of dynamic loads and distributed generation resources in distribution systems; (2) large-scale renewable energy integration at the transmission system level. A majority of these devices interface with power systems through power electronic converters. However, existing transient stability (TS) simulators are inadequate to represent the dynamic behavior of these devices accurately. On the other hand, simulating a large system using an electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulator is computationally impractical. EMT-TS hybrid simulation approach is an alternative to address these challenges. Furthermore, to thoroughly analyze the increased interactions among the transmission …

Contributors

Huang, Qiuhua, Vittal, Vijay, Undrill, John M., et al.

Created Date

2016

The standard optimal power flow (OPF) problem is an economic dispatch (ED) problem combined with transmission constraints, which are based on a static topology. However, topology control (TC) has been proposed in the past as a corrective mechanism to relieve overloads and voltage violations. Even though the benefits of TC are presented by several research works in the past, the computational complexity associated with TC has been a major deterrent to its implementation. The proposed work develops heuristics for TC and investigates its potential to improve the computational time for TC for various applications. The objective is to develop computationally …

Contributors

Balasubramanian, Pranavamoorthy, Hedman, Kory W, Vittal, Vijay, et al.

Created Date

2016