Power Engineering Chapter
IEEE Singapore Section

"Steady-State Instability in Continental Interconnection of Electricity Grids"

 by

Professor Ooi Boon Teck

Abstract:

Originally, power systems served local regions and were small and strong. As regional power systems networked together to enjoy the benefits of interconnection, lightly damped, low frequency oscillations were experienced and investigations showed that they were due to the generators in one large area swinging against the generators in another large area. Power system stabilizers (PSS) have been able to damp the oscillations. Over the years, the interconnection has continued to grow to continental scale and Innocent Kamwa has warned that the frequency will be lowered beyond the range of PSS.

The seminar points to research opportunities in several directions:

(i)                Improvement in PSS design.

(ii)              Partitioning the continental ac grid into several decoupled small units by FACTS controllers or HVDC.

(iii)            Taking advantage of Phasor Measurement Units (PMU), Wide Area Monitoring Systems (WAMS) and Parallel Computing to implement hierarchical control.

(iv)            Improvement in algorithms to solve eigenvalues and eigenvectors of large sparse matrices.     

 

Biography of Speaker：

Ooi Boon Teck attended the Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur. He obtained the B.Eng. (Honours) from the University of Adelaide, Australia, the S.M. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and the Ph.D. from McGill University, Canada. He was a lecturer in the Technical College (now UTM) in Kuala Lumpur. He is Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University. His research interests have been in linear and rotating electric machinery; subsynchronous resonance (SSR) instability, long distance transmission by HVdc, series and shunt capacitor compensation; power quality improvement by PWM-rectifiers; flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS); Voltage-Source Converter-HVDC. His present interest is how to increase the penetration of wind power in the utility grid.  He is Fellow of IEEE.

Dr. Chen Shiun (eschen@ntu.edu.sg), Power Engineering Chapter