Advancing emergency control of the European power supply
Keeping pace with the EC Directive 96/92, the current energy trends lead to the creation of an internal market with major changes in the European Power System (EPS). More specifically, the interconnected national grids, which are separately, controlled by a national operator consist the EPS that is now extended to East European and Mediterranean countries. Due to the high demands of cross-border energy trade, service providers are expected to operate the EPS at its maximum potential in order to remain competitive. This however, may lead to more stress exerted on the transmission grid and thus increase the system's vulnerability and unpredictability. Therefore, it is strategically important to take advanced measures for the effective monitoring and control of all possible disturbances. Urged by this, the EXaMINE project focused on developing suitable tools for operator assistance, not only for preventive maintenance, but also for emergency control. Such automatic emergency control schemes rely heavily on synchronised phasor measurement units, ultra-fast telecommunication systems and appropriate measurement based detection and control algorithms. This approach may be easily adopted for the analysis of any sort of fast or slow dynamic phenomena related with highly-disturbed conditions. The designed emergency control schemes may assure that the power system may absorb the contingencies without risking the dynamic stability of the overall system. The novel detection and control algorithms may handle the response time constraining situation of transient instabilities such as loss of synchronism and the frequently encountered voltage collapse. With the aid of off-line simulations it was shown that the algorithms may significantly contribute to a more reliable and less vulnerable future for the energy market.