TABLE OF CONTENTS Voltage stability analysis and control become increasingly important as the systems are being operated closer to their stability limits including voltage stability limits. This is due to the fact that there is lack of network investments and there are large amounts of power transactions across regions for economical reasons in electricity market environments. It has been recognized that a number of the system blackouts including the recent blackouts that happened in North America and Europe are related to voltage instabilities of the systems.
For voltage stability analysis, a number of special techniques such as power flow based methods and dynamic simulations methods have been proposed and have been used in electric utilities [1] [4]. Power flow based methods, which are considered as steady state analysis methods, include the standard power flow methods [5], continuation power flow methods [6] [11], optimization methods [18] [22], modal methods [2], singular decomposition methods [1], etc.
This chapter focuses on the methods for steady state power system voltage stability analysis and control with FACTS. The objectives of this chapter are summarized as follows:
to discuss steady state power system voltage stability analysis using continuation power flow techniques,
to formulate steady state power system voltage stability problem as an OPF problem,
to investigate FACTS control in steady state power system voltage stability analysis,
to discuss the transfer capability calculations using continuation power flow and optimal power flow methods,
to discuss security constrained OPF for transfer capability limit determination.
