PROTECTION AGAINST OVER VOLTAGES USING WIDE AREA CONTROL CONCEPT ABSTRACT:

The history of electrical power technology throughout the world is one of steady, and in recent years, rapid progress, which has made it possible to design and construct economic and reliable power systems capable of satisfying the continuing growth in the demand for electrical energy. In this, power system protection and control play a significant part, and progress in design and development in these fields has necessarily had to keep pace with advances in the design of primary plant, such as generators, transformers, switchgear, overhead lines, and under ground cables. Indeed progress in the fields of protection and control is a vital prerequisite for the efficient operation and continuing development of power supply systems as a whole. In the practical power systems we do not have a condition of steady load. The active and reactive power demands are never steady and they continually change with the raising or falling trend. Steam input to the turbogenerators (or water input in case of hydro generators) must be continuously regulated to match the active power demand, failing which the machine speed will vary with consequent change in frequency, which may be highly undesirable. A constant frequency system is very much necessary because any imbalance in frequency causes change in speed of consumers plant affecting production processes. Futher it is necessary to maintain network frequency constant so that the power station run satisfactorily in parallel, the various motors operating on the system run at the derived speed, correct time is obtained from synchronous clock in the system and the entertaining devices function properly. Also the excitation of the generators must be continually regulated to match the reactive power demand with reactive generation, otherwise the voltages at various systems may go beyond the prescribed limits. In modern large system manual regulation is not feasible and therefore automatic generation and voltage regulation equipment known as proportional plus integral controller is installed. Load frequency control with integral controller achieves zero steady state frequency error and fast dynamic response, but it exercises no control over the relative loadings of various generating stations (i.e., economic dispatch) of the controlled wide area. For example if a small increase in load (say 1%) occurs in a wide area, the load frequency control changes the speed changer settings of the governor of all generating units of the area so that together these units match the load and the frequency returns to the scheduled value. This takes a few seconds and hence some units get overloaded.

This is the major problem in all the power systems in our country. In the present situation a manual load shedding is being done which may even lead to the damage of few protective devices. This led the man to think of an alternate solution and also there is a lot of necessity for increasing the reaction speed by decreasing the error time. Hence this lead to the introduction of WIDE AREA CONCEPT in which the reaction speed comes down to very few milliseconds. In this report we discuss briefly about all possible ways which are responsible for the occurrence of over voltages in the system by studying a practical system of NTPC SIMHADRI unit which is situated in the out skirts of Visakhapatnam having a generating capacity of 1000MW. Also we explain the problems associated in load shedding by revising the previous practical examples and suggest a better methodology of placing a master computer which is the main unit for the WIDE AREA CONTROLLER concept and thus refresh the system for every few milliseconds thereby increasing the efficiency of the system.