A dynamic-adaptive load shedding methodology to improve frequency resilience of power systems

Abstract Frequency stability is one of the major concerns for secured operation of a power system. A severe disturbance causes rapid frequency decline, which may instigate power system blackout in an extreme case. In emergency situations, load shedding is applied to arrest frequency excursion. Therefore, a load shedding scheme needs to be sufficiently adaptive to tackle sudden generation loss. Note that conventional load shedding schemes may fail to provide satisfactory frequency response in certain cases. To address this challenge, a new dynamic-adaptive load shedding mechanism is proposed in this paper. The proposed methodology considers the actual contingency size, frequency sensitivity due to load damping, frequency response and ranking of load buses according to voltage stability index. The method ensures that the actual load cut is sufficiently close to the required load shedding to keep system frequency within the given acceptable limit. To do so, it ranks the load buses within a zone and dynamically selects appropriate feeders for load shedding. It also proportionally applies higher amount of load shedding to relatively weaker buses for taking care of the voltage stability. To examine the performance of the proposed scheme, it is applied to the IEEE 39 bus test system that is divided into six zones. It is found from simulations that for 600 MW, 700 MW and 900 MW generation loss events in zone-3, the required amounts of load shedding are 430 MW, 531 MW and 730 MW respectively to keep system frequency above 49.1 Hz. However, these quantities increase to 450 MW, 550 MW and 749 MW respectively to retain system frequency above 49.2 Hz. Furthermore, the impact of 400 MW generation loss in zone-1 is explored. It is found that after shedding additional loads in zone-1 and zone-2, the risk of tie line overloading is mitigated that eventually assures tie line security. In addition, performances of the proposed algorithm are compared to that of an adaptive technique and a semi-adaptive technique. It is noticed that the proposed methodology provides better results than the existing methods. Therefore, it can be articulated that the developed scheme ensures the correct amount of load shedding to maintain satisfactory frequency response and voltage stability.