Model experiments and study on regulating stability of isolated hydropower plants

Hydropower shoulders a large portion of the regulation and balancing duty in many power systems all over the world. The stable regulation of hydropower plants (HPPs) is a conventional and crucial research topic, and many meaningful studies have been carried out by theoretical analysis and numerical simulations; however seldom experimental works on this issue are reported. This paper investigates stability of isolated HPPs based on model experiments on an integral experiment platform for transient processes of pumped storage plants in Wuhan University. Theoretical stability analysis is conducted based on Routh - Hurwitz stability criterion, and the stability region of the model power plant is obtained. The experiment results validate the theoretical analysis on the system stability, and the instability of the hydropower system due to poor settings of speed governor parameters are captured and demonstrated. This work presents initial results of experimental study on oscillation characteristics and regulation performance of HPPs for power system stability.