Adaptive Wide-Area Load Shedding Scheme Based on the Sink and Source Concept to Preserve Power System Stability

In this article, a novel wide-area scheme is proposed based on a new sink and source area (SSA) concept. The SSA concept identifies the sink and source regions using a limited number of system voltage phasors. These voltage phasors can be easily transmitted to the control center using a few number of phasor measurement units (PMUs). The SSA idea is used to determine the priority of load buses or regions in the load shedding procedure. Since the SSAs are directly dependent to the generation and load distributions among the resource and demands, they vary over the time. The load shedding locations identified by SSA will accordingly change, which makes more technical sense versus selection of fixed candidates regardless of the real-time operation status. Furthermore, the amount of load shedding is adaptively determined based on the comprehensive analysis of interaction characteristics between load buses. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on two networks under various realistic scenarios. The simulation studies' results reveal promising operation of the proposed approach comparing to that of other load shedding techniques. Moreover, the required number of PMUs and communication infrastructure are presented and the impact of communication link delay on the proposed algorithm is investigated.